by Laurie Lee
The rest of the night was devoted to that most fundamental, most mysterious of all encounters in Andalusian folk-music – the cante flamenco. Three people only take part and the stage itself is reduced to bareness. First comes the guitarist, a neutral, dark-suited figure, carrying his instrument in one hand and a kitchen chair in another. He places the chair in the shadows, sits himself comfortably, leans his cheek close to the guitar and spreads his white fingers over the strings. He strikes a few chords in the darkness, speculatively, warming his hands and his imagination together. Presently the music becomes more confident and free, the crisp strokes of the rhythms more challenging. At that moment the singer walks into the light, stands with closed eyes, and begins to moan in the back of his throat as though testing the muscles of his voice. The audience goes deathly quiet, for what is coming has never been heard before, and will never be heard again. Suddenly the singer takes a gasp of breath, throws back his head and hits a high barbaric note, a naked wail of sand and desert, serpentine, prehensile. Shuddering then, with contorted and screwed-up face, he moves into the first verse of his song. It is a lament of passion, an animal cry, thrown out, as it were, over burning rocks, a call half-lost in air, but imperative and terrible. At first, in this wilderness, he remains alone, writhing in the toils of his words, whipped to more frenzied utterance by the invisible lash of the guitar.
At last, the awful solitude of his cry is answered by a dry shiver of castanets off-stage, the rustle of an awakened cicada, stirred by the man’s hot voice. Gradually the pulse grows more staccato, stronger, louder, nearer. Then slow as a creeping fire, her huge eyes smoking, her red dress trailing like flames behind her, the girl appears from the wings. Her white arms are raised like snakes above her, her head is thrown back, her breasts and belly taut, while from her snapping, flickering fingers the black mouths of the castanets hiss and rattle, a tropic tongue, eloquent and savage. The man remains motionless, his arms outstretched, throwing forth loops of song around her and drawing her close towards him. And slowly, on drumming feet, she advances, tossing her head and uttering little cries. Once caught within his orbit she begins to circle him, weaving and writhing, stamping and turning; her castanets chatter, tremble, whisper; her limbs are entangled in his song, coiled in it, reflecting each parched and tortured phrase by the voluptuous postures of her body. And so they act out together long tales of love: singing, dancing, joined but never touching.
This form of the flamenco, the most dramatic and exhausting, has fused both song and dance into an erotic perfection such as I believe exists nowhere else in the world. Only the moral embargoes of Spanish society, coupled with its natural paganism, could produce such a volcanic yet exquisitely controlled sexuality as this. The man is all voice; the woman all pride and hunger. While his song climbs into ecstasies of improvisation she coils in toils and sobs and throbs around him. And always there is the invisible guitar, whipping them delicately from the dark, feeding their secret fevers.
Now comes our last days – with the boat that was to carry us home already signalled from the Suez. The March sun grew to summer heat and the girls put on their thinnest, most liquid dresses. On the white walls of taverns, and under arches of bridges, bright posters appeared to announce the spring fiestas. It was a bad time to leave, and we felt like children condemned to their cold beds just when the downstairs party was due to begin. But there was nothing for it; our money was spent, our tickets bought; and Tuesday, with the homeward boat, moved steadily nearer Gibraltar.
How crystal sharp the town appeared suddenly under its arc of mountains, how bright the flowers and washing on the roofs, how profound the shadows thrown on the cobbled streets. Each simple gesture of beggar and fisherman assumed an almost mythological significance, each pedlar’s cry seemed invested with timeless poetry. ‘I have caramels, tomatoes and ham from the hills!’ ‘I have octopus from the sea, most rich and good!’ ‘I have a few numbers the best and most fortunate!’ ‘Limpia! Limpia!’ ‘African de hoy!’
The ferry came in with its crooks and tourists; the smugglers snuffled in doorways their pockets bulging; the green-cloaked policemen leant dozing on their muskets; and each night the fishing-boats put out over the flat sea to hunt for tunny and cigarettes.
In the town the housewives went daily to the church, to pray for a cheap piece of fish, or strength for their husbands’ thighs. The girls in groups walked through the streets parading their unassailable bodies. The boys sat daylong at café tables discussing football and philosophy. And the beggar children, sore-lipped and with eyes diseased, scampered in gutters, smiling their beautiful smiles.
Perched in this southern town, one’s thoughts already moving towards home, one felt intensely the great square weight of Spain stretching away north behind one; felt all there was to leave, from these palm-fringed tropic shores to the misty hills of Bilbao; the plains of la Mancha, Sierras of pine and snow, the golden villages perched on their gorges, wine smells of noon and sweet wood smoke of evening, the strings of mules crawling through huge brown landscapes, the rarity of grass, the wood ploughs scratching the dusty fields, and the families at evening sitting down to their plates of beans. One heard the silences of the Sierras, the cracking of sun-burnt rocks, the sharp jungle voices of the women, the tavern-murmur of the men, the love songs of the girls rising at dawn, the sobbing of asses and whine of hungry dogs. Spain of cathedrals, palaces, caves and hovels; of blood-stained bull-rings and prison-yards; of weeping Virgins, tortured Christs, acid humour and incomparable song – all this lay anchored between the great troughs of its mountains, locked in its local dialects, bound by its own sad pride.
Spain is but Spain, and belongs nowhere but where it is. It is neither Catholic nor European but a structure of its own, forged from an African-Iberian past which exists in its own austere reality and rejects all short-cuts to a smoother life. Let the dollars come, the atom-bomb air-bases blast their way through the white-walled towns, the people, I feel, will remain unawed, their lips unstained by chemical juices, their girls unslacked, and their music unswung. For they possess a natural resistance to civilization’s more superficial seductions, based partly on the power of their own poetry, and partly on their incorruptible sense of humour and dignity.
The home-bound liner lay anchored across the bay, and Juan, one of the waiters, brought us the news. Juan, in summer, was a bull-fighter, and was always showing his scars. ‘I have brought a beautiful picture of myself being tossed by a bull,’ he said. ‘It is in colour. Keep it to remember me by.’ As we packed our bags came others with gifts of farewell. Ramón gave us a drawing of his child and some wine from his wife’s vineyard; Manolo, a sheaf of poems; Isidro, a loaf flavoured with saffron and currants. Friends from the taverns showered me with sherry and bottle-openers, and an old fisherman handed me some coplas which he had composed to Kati’s beauty.
The last morning was a grape-blue mist of still air and water. Manolo and Isidro, solemn-faced, dressed in their best, were to take us to the harbour. The chambermaids descended upon Kati with tears and kisses, begging her to return, and giving her gifts of lace. Then we gathered all our luggage, guitars, tambourines and jars of wine, piled them on a hand-cart and set off for the tender. Girls on the quays were packing fish in ice and palm leaves. The oily water of the harbour floated with lottery tickets and orange peel, the debris of a discarded winter. The peaks of the mountains towards Málaga appeared out of the blue mist like a froth of burnt sugar.
The tender blew its siren and we climbed the gangway on to its throbbing deck. Manolo and Isidro stood looking up at us from the dockside, their hats in their hands, their eyes like dark olives.
‘This is your home,’ said Manolo formally. ‘And my house is yours.’
Isidro said nothing. The siren blew again.
‘Go with God,’ said Manolo, looking at me.
‘And return a widow,’ muttered Isidro, looking at Kati.
Then we drew away from the harbour and from the town, and
headed across the smooth waters of the bay, to the waiting ship, to the smell of brewed tea, to the shuffle of bridge-cards and the snows of London. And Spain slid back from our eyes into the mist, leaving us lost and footless on a naked sea.
Acknowledgements
Acknowledgements are due to the B.B.C. and the London Magazine for permission to use certain material in this book.
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Copyright © Laurie Lee 1955
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First published in Great Britain in 1955 by Hogarth Press
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