Duende

by Jason Webster

  I realised that being friendly was the most normal way of having contact with other people, which meant that anything, from buying a loaf of bread to posting a letter, could become a social event. The bank clerk and I soon got to know one another, and as I was withdrawing money, he might enquire about how I was getting on settling down in his lovely city, or answer my questions on some point of grammar I hadn’t quite mastered. The man at the meat stall in the covered market would tell me of the house he was building for himself and his family up the coast at San Juan, and pass on the best way to cook a chicken breast with a little oil and lemon. The lady at the flower stall explained how best to protect my skin from the sun: ‘You see, I have a cousin from the north with white skin like yours . . .’

  I met Eduardo one morning near the beach. He had a powerful confidence and easy wit that immediately captured me. He was a streetwise wideboy – a chulo – who had a natural gift for knowing all the right people and places for whatever situation he found himself in. Few realised, as I later discovered, that in fact he was an insecure man, a nail-biter and stutterer – this last trait only appeared when he let his guard down – and his charm was a mask, hard-won after years of struggling with himself. But he had emerged as an excellent journalist, an affable man with an underlying sharpness that could winkle out the real story those he went after were trying to conceal. Not a month went by without a piece bearing his byline appearing in a local newspaper with another tale of corruption within local government.

  We met in mid-winter, just as I was beginning to feel that everything was stagnating. The lessons with Juan were continuing, but I had reached a plateau in my playing. There were none of the rapid leaps in technique I had enjoyed at the beginning. I was practising hour after hour and felt I was getting worse. And our classes were becoming harder to bear. Now that I knew how to hold the guitar, it was simply a question of hammering out palo after palo, week after week, never managing to create the wonderful sound that he made when showing me what to do.

  ‘Por Dios!’ he would mutter as soon as I had started. ‘Why the hell did I ever come out of retirement for a stupid guiri like this?’

  I played on, scowling at him as my head leaned in concentration over the guitar. The reference to my foreignness smarted.

  ‘I’ll show him. I’ll show him. Bastard.’

  And I had had no luck in establishing a friendship with Lola either. We had barely talked for months. She hadn’t been to the bar for a long time, and at the school her mood was so fierce I felt uncomfortable even looking at her.

  As ever with Eduardo, our meeting and the subsequent friendship that quickly developed felt like the right person in the right place at the right time. He was passionate about nuevo flamenco and swore he had every recording since 1975, lovingly catalogued on his computer, complete with notes and observations.

  ‘Of course, it all started with Paco and Almoraima,’ he said one evening as we sat under the palm trees drinking horchata – tiger-nut milk – on the breezy esplanade. Never one to understate things, I had the impression he was about to pass down some important information.

  ‘What started?’ I asked tentatively.

  ‘Paco de Lucía. 1976.’

  I was puzzled.

  ‘He brought out Almoraima in 1976 and that was it. Bam! He reinvented flamenco. It was dying, dead, before then.’

  Paco was a big name; the father of the new sound. He had taken the ideas of players from the previous generation – Sabicas and El Niño Ricardo – and transformed them, introducing new elements from jazz and rock. Now probably the best-known flamenco on the planet, he had an ever-larger following outside Spain after his collaboration with John McLaughlin and Al di Meola in the 1980s. Almost every contemporary flamenco guitarist owed a debt to him in their playing, so great was the impact of the revolution he had spearheaded over the previous two decades. He had his critics – people who thought the music had been sacrificed for technique – but they were a minority. Most aficionados revered him, and his new records were always eagerly awaited to see if the great master was about to point out a new direction for the rest to follow.

  ‘What do you mean, dead?’ I retorted. ‘What about all the people before him? Carlos Montoya . . .’

  ‘Carlos Montoya? Don’t make me laugh. Have you ever heard Carlos Montoya?’

  ‘Yes, I . . .’

  ‘Ese no vale una mierda! Crap. Can’t play to save his life. You listen to his compás, it’s all over the place. Can’t keep the rhythm. I tell you, if he were playing today, he’d be laughed off the stage.’

  ‘Oh, come on! You mean everyone who’s playing now is better than him?’

  ‘Yes.’ His answer was so abrupt and confident it was impossible to argue.

  ‘You need to be listening to a lot more stuff if you’re still on Carlos Montoya, son. Tomatito, Gerardo Núñez, Pepe Habichuela – these are the guys you’ve got to get hold of.’

  I had to concede. I still knew too little about it all to start arguing with a real aficionado. Besides, it would be a sign of even greater weakness to admit I couldn’t hear the supposed flaws.

  ‘Listen, son, if you’re as interested in flamenco as you say you are, you’ve got to learn everything about it. Got to turn yourself into an expert. You can’t be ignorant all your life.’

  I nodded.

  ‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘you’ll find out soon enough: flamenco does strange things to you.’

  Over the following weeks I learned as much as I could from my new flamenco guru. Juan would teach me how to play, but it was Eduardo who would tell me all there was to know about the contemporary scene: who to listen to, who to avoid, why such-and-such a player was so important, the lesser-known guitarists some of the greats had taken their ideas from. From here, it was a full-on flamenco course. My day was taken up either playing the guitar with Juan, listening to tapes lent to me by Eduardo, or hearing him talking about it into the early hours. He would often come to the flat unannounced for a tutorial on his way to interview a local official, or we would meet at a café on the sea-front before moving to the late-night bars in the barrio. His obsession was far greater than anything I had come across amongst Lola’s group of friends, who, I soon realised, were mere amateurs by comparison. Eduardo could talk endlessly, and loved nothing better than to have me as his disciple, a new convert to the cause in a world which, in his eyes, was appreciating real flamenco less and less.

  ‘Paco may be the leader of the pack, but a lot’s down to his dad. He had this plan to take over flamenco. Tried to turn all five kids into professional flamencos. Almost succeeded. His only failure is the second son – ended up working in a hotel in Madrid, or something.’ He waved for two more beers. ‘Don’t get me wrong: Paco’s a genius, greatest player of his time. But, well, has he gone too far? That’s the question.’

  ‘Too far in what?’ I asked.

  ‘Too jazzy, son, too jazzy. Here, how much flamenco are you listening to?

  ‘Um . . .’

  ‘It’s just that his latest stuff’s straying a bit too far for my liking. Some people love it. So do I. Love it. But is it still flamenco? I don’t know. For me, well . . . it’s his early stuff that’s just brilliant, just brilliant. Of course, some say he just nicked all his ideas from others like El Niño Miguel. But you hear them playing, and you know, you can just tell, Paco’s just storming. Amazing.’

  ‘You can tell them apart, then?’ Still drowning in ignorance, I took a punt on what sounded like a more educated question.

  ‘Course, son. Por supuesto. Much earthier sound, not all there. But he didn’t have the contacts. Not like Paco. No wonder he never made it big. He’s poor and forgotten now.’

  There was another ‘great’ in modern flamenco, though, and Eduardo revered him even more than Paco.

  ‘Camarón de la Isla.’ His voice would go all soft and wobbly just at the name. I found it hard to get enthusiastic about someone called the ‘Shrimp of the Island’.

 
; ‘The greatest singer there’s ever been. Anywhere. Other singers can do it sometimes, but he, he . . .’ His eyes would go all strange at this point, mad and staring.

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘It. Duende.’

  I sat up. Yes, what did duende mean to Eduardo? What was it?

  From the look he gave me I might as well have asked him if he suffered from haemorrhoids. Slowly he pulled a tape from his pocket and handed it to me.

  ‘Go home and listen to this.’

  Back in the flat I put the tape on. Camarón had a much higher voice than I’d expected from the photo on the front cover: a light-haired man with a saurian face and bright, emotional eyes. But as soon as the music began, I could understand Eduardo’s devotion. He had a unique voice that conveyed a gut-twisting, tragic sorrow. Even when singing happier pieces – an Alegría for example – there was an unmistakable melancholy and agony in his voice. And from what Eduardo told me, he was an explosive character: a Gypsy and the ‘hard man’ of flamenco whose life reflected the passion of his art. It was widely suspected that he was an alcoholic and drug addict. And predictably, perhaps, he had died young of a mysterious illness. People thought it might have been AIDS, but nobody was sure, only that they had lost the greatest flamenco of their generation, a man who had now been immortalised.

  ‘A man like that only comes once every hundred years,’ Eduardo told me when I handed the tape back. ‘There might never be another one like him. This is a Golden Age, a Golden Age, I tell you. Catch it, because it’s going to end soon.’

  chapter THREE

  * * *

  Por Sevillanas

  Me dió unos zapatitos

  del ala de mi sombrero.

  Muy fino y muy flamenquito,

  que es muy flamenco,

  mi zapatero.

  He made me some shoes

  from the brim of my hat.

  He’s very proper and ‘flamenco’,

  my cobbler.

  Camarón de la Isla

  ‘THIS IS A classy newspaper. Bloody bible for most people out here.’

  The Costa Gazette was based 30 miles or so up the coast in the tourist mecca of Benidorm, formerly an attractive fishing village that had quickly lost its essential character after the discovery of its special ‘microclimate’ and the beginning of the tourism boom. With the Fifties came the town planners, and the village’s three elegant bays were soon draped in concrete and dissected by arrow-straight roads.

  Foreigners were thin on the ground in Alicante and I enjoyed the genuinely Spanish life there. Going to Benidorm would feel like I was letting myself down, almost like returning to England itself. But Eduardo was urging me on to try my hand at journalism. I needed to get out more, he said, broaden myself. Learning the guitar wasn’t enough on its own.

  Eduardo had met Barry, the editor of the Costa Gazette, a handful of times. The paper frequently rewrote material from local Spanish-language newspapers, translating and summarising to fill its own news pages, so there was something of a debt owed. We planned simply to turn up and take it from there. Picking up a copy of the paper from a newsagent, though, I began to wonder if the whole thing was really such a good idea. It was a bizarre hybrid of local news, results from the amateur bowling league and soft porn. Not a world I expected to slot into easily. But I was beginning to understand something of Eduardo’s intention. In his view, becoming a flamenco was all a question of being able to slot into anything at any time, if possible. Working as a journalist would be part of the course.

  ‘Each palo is different, has a different feel,’ he said, ‘and every time you play it, it’s different. As a guitarist you are going to have to be able to move in and out of each one, bringing whatever is necessary at each moment to bring out the best performance in those around you – the dancers and singers – and even to lift yourself as well.’

  It seemed odd to think that working on a local ex-pat rag might help me develop as a flamenco, but my guru had spoken and I dutifully followed, led, not least, by a degree of curiosity.

  We decided to make a day of it, travelling up on the ancient, smog-bellowing trenet – which chugged up and down the coast so slowly it was surprising when it actually reached anywhere. We were surrounded by Germans, Swedes, Dutch and English, all soaking up the much-needed winter light. The low, white sun shone brilliantly in our eyes, reflecting off the shimmering sea beneath us, as we inched our way along beaches and clifftops. Opposite us sat an Englishwoman, a long-term resident, and her friend who had come to visit for a week or so. No English reserve here, I noticed: far from murmuring quietly so as not to disturb the other passengers and keep her conversation private, she raised her voice unselfconsciously above the din of the engine and the dozen other voices echoing around the carriage. Spain, it seemed, could have a radical effect on foreigners.

  The train shuddered up the coast, pulling beyond the built-up areas of Alicante, past Pedro’s house, San Juan and out onto the cliffs perched over the clear water of the Mediterranean. Looking out the window, I felt I had never properly understood the term ‘sea-blue’ until that moment. It was an infinitely rich, passionate experience of colour, deeply satisfying, the shifting tones of turquoise and purple contrasting sharply against the yellow, white and green of the rocks and trees around us.

  Just before we reached our destination, the mustachioed inspector, complete with peaked cap and missing shirt button, arrived to sell us our tickets. Eduardo and I paid up reluctantly, irritated at having come so close to a free ride. A Scotsman grunted, handing over the largest note he thought would cover it. The Englishwoman opposite struggled to get the tickets she wanted using sign-language, pidgin Spanish, and clearly and loudly spoken English. The inspector couldn’t understand what she was saying, or at least he was giving nothing away. Eduardo and I intervened and translated. As the beleaguered inspector moved on the woman leaned over: ‘You know I’ve lived here for twenty years and I can still barely say a word.’

  No wonder the ex-pats needed their own newspaper.

  The offices of the Costa Gazette were on a narrow street no more than a hundred yards from the sea-front, in a low building set among soaring white towers with orange and green sun-blinds flapping in the breeze. We climbed the dim stairs, entering what seemed to be a collection of holiday flats, cheaply constructed and producing a permanent sense of unease from the thought that they might collapse at any minute. It felt like entering a house of cards.

  The newspaper offices were shabby. A teenage girl sat in reception behind a beaten-up old desk, wrapping papers with a sulky look on her face. She said nothing, but gestured with her thumb for us to enter the main room. Walking through, I almost fell as my foot caught in the gaping holes in the dirty brown carpet. Inside the main office piles of papers, clippings and negatives littered every surface. It was small and cramped and dingy. Everything was a dull, nondescript colour. A few curious eyes peeked up to ascertain the source of the break in the monotony, then looked down again, satisfied that we posed no threat.

  After a moment or two, a cheerful woman with thick glasses and a northern English accent approached us and asked if she could help. Eduardo explained we wanted to see the editor. Half-expecting to be told to return later – editors were, after all, busy people – I was surprised when we were immediately taken into what looked like a kind of glass and wooden shack in the corner of the main room. Glamour photos of busty women adorned the walls. Some of them looked familiar from copies of the newspaper I had read before coming. A middle-aged man with a bright yellow silk shirt and lazy, bored eyes stood up.

  ‘Eduardo, my boy. Always a pleasure.’

  I shook his hand.

  ‘Barry,’ he grunted.

  We sat down, sinking into a corner on a low sofa.

  ‘What can I do for you two gents?’

  Eduardo took the initiative, speaking quickly in an authoritative, colloquial Spanish, which somehow seemed to shift the balance of power. He explained he was here to intr
oduce me, a journalist friend of long standing who was looking for work in Spain. I sat quietly, trying to look engaged, as my attention wandered from buttock to breast to buttock again along the row of pin-ups.

  ‘What’s your background, then?’

  I tried to say something, but Eduardo butted in, racing on with his big sell. A string of untruths was elaborated, detailing my professional record – editor of the university newspaper, contacts in Fleet Street – and I nearly choked when I heard that I was married to one of his journalist colleagues.

  ‘Oh, lovely!’ Barry’s dull eyes lit up at this point.

  ‘Well, Jason. I’d be happy for you to come in a couple of days a week for a trial period,’ he drawled. ‘But I can only pay the usual rate: five pesetas a line.’

  I nearly choked again. Was he joking? Two pence a line? But a dig in the ribs from Eduardo held me back. I nodded my approval politely, and the interview came to an end. We shook hands and left.

  I was glad to get out of there. Barry’s odd eyes bothered me as my attention oscillated between the conversation and the incredibly large breasts of a woman in a lime-green G-string pinned to the back wall. Eduardo tried to reassure me about the job.

  ‘Don’t worry, son. They’ll be asking you for more and more in no time. And the pay will get better. You’ll probably be running the place in a few months.’

  A week later, I returned for my first day. I was introduced to Jonathan, the only full-time journalist working there. A slight, narrow-shouldered man with a mild manner and an undisguised look of fear in his eyes, Jonathan made up for the lack of other hacks in the office by swilling a steady flow of San Miguel beer and smoking eighty cigarettes a day. So strong was his addiction to nicotine, that his whole family once had to fly to their holiday in Florida via Iceland so that he could have a mid-Atlantic puff.