Duende

by Jason Webster

  ‘I’m going this way,’ she said. I nodded. Normally when we parted from social encounters, we kissed one another on the cheeks, but this time there was hesitation. She wavered, stepping backwards and forwards, as though undecided.

  ‘Do you think . . .’ I began.

  ‘I’ll see you at school tomorrow,’ she said, turning away and heading down the hill. I stood, watching her walk, the gentle rhythm of her hips.

  It was late, and very quiet. A Tuesday. One of only two nights off for the town’s revellers. Guidebooks on Spain always cite figures showing there to be more bars per square inch than people, or more cafés in Madrid than in the whole of the rest of the world put together. I forget what the real numbers are, but the impression they give is generally true. You can barely find a street that doesn’t have some sort of watering hole, usually several, and this is reflected in the night life. The party normally starts on a Thursday, because having a hangover on a Friday doesn’t really count. Then of course there are Friday and Saturday nights. This usually drags on until Sunday, because once on a roll, why bother stopping? And Monday hangovers don’t really count for much either. For the really hardcore, even Monday night can swing. Not that the Spanish ever get really drunk in an Anglo-Saxon way, though. Alcohol is merely a means to an end – having fun. And for such a devout and social race, having fun begins to take on almost religious dimensions, where sleep is an act of apostasy and only the hardened all-nighters are guaranteed a place in the Kingdom of Heaven. Tuesday and Wednesday are the real days of the weekend in Spain – the only days when rest for all is a certainty and religious duties are excused.

  Walking back home under the palm trees along the empty road, I could hear my footsteps echoing against the buildings on the other side. At my front door, I paused. A woman struggling to carry a mattress had turned the corner and was coming up behind me. I asked her where she was going.

  ‘My house is just around the corner,’ she said in a strong French accent. ‘Can you ’elp me?’

  I picked up one end of the mattress and we set off. Five minutes around the block, I thought, and I’ll be back before midnight.

  We headed towards the market, walking in silence, trying to keep a grip on the old mattress as it kept slipping between our fingers. I could feel the dust from it rising up in clouds and tickling my nose. We went past the market, past the bank and down onto the Rambla, the wide road leading to the beach. Hardly around the corner, I thought, but we must be getting close by now.

  ‘I live just here, in the barrio,’ she said. We walked on into the old quarter. My hands were tiring and the sweat made the surface of my palms even more slippery. It felt like carrying an enormous fish. And who was this strange, slight Frenchwoman? She certainly wasn’t talkative. I felt cheated. Surely my compensation for all this effort was a little conversation.

  ‘It’s a heavy old mattress you’ve got here,’ I said. She didn’t reply.

  We kept walking, through the narrow alleyways, past all the bars, the little cinema, the decrepit square. Where were we going? She said it was close by. I was beginning to regret my act of charity. On we went, up the steep hill into the cluster of white houses at the foot of the castle, deep into areas I had no idea existed. In the moonlight I could see blurred graffiti on crumbling walls, written in a language I didn’t understand. I was sweating from the exertion now, cursing this woman for taking advantage of my willingness to help. Where the bloody hell did she live? Perhaps she didn’t have a house at all and was looking for somewhere to bed down for the night.

  Finally we arrived at a line of small houses on the very edge of the old town, to the rear of the castle.

  ‘It’s ’ere,’ she said. Her house was the final one in the row. We got to her door, put the mattress down and she went inside to turn on the lights.

  ‘Thank you. I can manage now.’ I stood there. It seemed strange just to turn on my heel and head straight home. I felt I had been through something with this woman, even if I was cursing her most of the way. She noticed my hesitation.

  ‘Did you want to come in?’ she asked.

  ‘No. I think . . .’

  ‘Here, then. Take my card. Come back whenever you like.’ She reached into her pocket and handed me a torn piece of paper. ‘Christine’ it said. ‘Psychic’.

  I returned one afternoon the following week, justifying my visit with the thought that she owed me something. Perhaps she could tell my fortune.

  She welcomed me matter-of-factly and beckoned me in.

  The house was small, white, and decorated with Moroccan rugs, Indian shawls, and sweet-smelling candles. There were symbols hanging from the walls: ankhs, pentacles, peace signs.

  After a few moments she emerged with some camomile tea. ‘Here,’ she said. ‘It’s all I ’ave.’

  We sat in silence on brightly coloured cushions strewn on the floor. Now that I’d come I wasn’t quite sure what to say.

  ‘Mattress all right?’ I tried.

  ‘Hm? Oh, yes. The mattress is fine.’

  She was looking at me, or rather staring at me quite intensely. I tried to concentrate on the decorations on the walls, the books on the shelf. Works on healing, magic, mysticism.

  ‘I can read the cards for you,’ she said suddenly, ‘if you like.’

  ‘OK. Sure.’ I was relieved something was going to happen. I had been drinking my tea so quickly it had burnt my throat.

  She handed me a pack of large cards and I was asked to shuffle.

  ‘I take it you are heterosexual?’ The word sounded odd in her thick accent.

  ‘Er, yeah,’ I said, taken slightly aback.

  ‘You know, it is better to ask these days. You cannot know, you know?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘I might see your partner and not know whether to say “he” or “she”.’

  ‘No, “she” is fine. Just fine.’

  She laid the cards out on the floor between us and began to concentrate. I looked down. No death card: that was a relief. What did the others mean, though? It looked like a mess.

  ‘It hits me straight away,’ she said. ‘You have many good attributes, but here,’ she rapped her fist hard against her chest, ‘you have not grown up here. In your emotions.’ She paused, then said, ‘You are emotionally immature.’

  Her words rang inside me like a bell and I sat back on the cushions, confused. How could one be emotionally immature? It seemed such a strange idea. Surely one just grew, and developed. It took care of itself, didn’t it? Maybe not. Somewhere, part of me understood just what she meant. Wasn’t that one of the reasons I was here in Spain, after all, this most emotional of countries? Hadn’t it been the warmth, the emotional ease of the Spaniards that had kept me here, had attracted me to flamenco and the country in the first place?

  The Frenchwoman continued.

  ‘You feel as though the universe is pushing you towards having a relationship with a woman, a woman you know. But it is for you to say, for you to decide. It is of no concern to the universe if you do or you do not.’ She now had my undivided attention.

  ‘You may suffer, it depends on you. But there will be grieving soon. In the next year. But also change. You will not recognise your future self.’

  She picked up the cards and put them away. ‘That is all for now. I must ask you to leave.’

  I stood up and brushed myself down, still dazed by what she had said. Heading out into the sun from her cave-like home, I was temporarily blinded by the light. I turned to say goodbye, but the door had already closed.

  chapter FOUR

  * * *

  Por Alegrías

  Ay Dolores,

  como huele

  tu cuerpo a flores!

  Oh, Dolores,

  your body

  scented like flowers!

  ‘YOU CAN’T ORDER passion. It has to come in its own time.’

  I sat in Juan’s living-room on his red sofa tuning up my guitar. The place smelt of stale cigarettes. We hadn�
��t begun yet and he was still in a good mood.

  I was beginning to discover something about my playing, about how I would be drawn to particular palos depending on my mood or emotions: a Taranta for melancholy, Alegría for a certain type of joy, Tango for sexual energy. Eduardo had already talked about it, but I wanted to hear what Juan had to say.

  ‘How can we perform a palo on cue? Flamenco is a way of life, not something to be produced on demand. Anyone who thinks otherwise is a fool. Flamenco is love. Passion. Not something we can control with a click of the fingers.’

  After months of him telling me this, I felt I was close to understanding what he meant.

  ‘It will all become clearer as you get better.’

  Enough theory, back to the playing. I looked down at the guitar. Progress was not achieved step by step, as I had expected it to be. It seemed cyclical, if anything.

  ‘Eventually the guitar will become your novia – your fiancée,’ Juan had said. ‘You will love her more than any woman. A guitar is more responsive and as long as you treat her well, she will never betray you.’

  For the first months it had felt like a foreign object: a strange, cold, varnished being never comfortable in my grasp, always rejecting me and pulling away. But I persisted, forcing it into place, my arms and fingers constantly inching around it in an intuitive search for the correct position. It began to take on symbolic importance: only when I had successfully reinvented myself as a flamenco would the guitar accept me, went the thought. Often I would sit for hours with it on my lap, not playing, just holding it there against me, warming it with my body, resting my arms on its curves as I gazed out the window or read through notes for the English class I had to give later in the evening. With time it would come, I told myself. Real skills needed sacrifice and hard work. And so I continued, spending hour after hour in repetitive practice, training my hands to perform new and complicated tasks until slowly the instrument began to feel like it belonged.

  Right-hand techniques are the most difficult, and modern flamenco guitar players pride themselves on them. The left hand creates the melody as it forms the chords and notes, but the right hand is the more important, creating rhythm as it strikes both strings and wood in complex, dextrous movements. Flamenco guitars usually come with a plastic plate stuck to the soundboard to protect the wood as the player taps the rhythm hard with his ring finger. In earlier times the instrument served mostly as a musical and percussive complement to the singer, and many performers accompanied themselves as they sang. With time, as both singing and playing developed, they were separated, and now it is very rare to find people who do both.

  I always practised on a white plastic fold-up chair in my living-room, palm fronds brushing against the bay windows in the breeze and creating whirling patterns in the dirt on the panes. Bent almost double over the guitar, I’d strike down on the strings one by one in a roll – a rasgueo. It was a strain at first; my fingers were not used to working independently of one another, but little by little they began to loosen and strengthen and the pain would lessen. And I had a sense of satisfaction when, for the first time in my life, seeing myself reflected in the glass door to my bedroom, I could see the individual muscles flexing on my forearm. I tried to alternate techniques for each day, two hours or more spent simply trying to improve my triple – a sideways roll of the wrist involving the thumb and middle finger – or striking the strings quickly with my first and middle fingers, the picado. Nights came and I often ended up entering a kind of trance, with a loss of all sense of time, until I fell into bed around three or four in the morning.

  Over the previous week I’d been practising a Rondeña. The palo was named after Ronda, a pretty town perched on the edge of a precipitous gorge in the Andalusian mountains. It involved retuning the guitar, dropping the sixth string to a D and the third string to an F sharp, to create a deep, rich, evocative and immediately recognisable sound. Juan had composed this one, he told me, when he was living in Seville near the Giralda tower.

  ‘A wonderful time in my life,’ he said. ‘Such beautiful people.’

  I had been playing it almost non-stop, my mind absorbed by the meeting with Lola at the bar. I couldn’t tell if I was just imagining a spark between us that night, and while we were both at the school there was no chance of talking to her. Her hard, professional mask meant that even when we looked at one another, which was seldom, there was nothing, no recognition, no lowering of the barriers that had previously, if momentarily, seemed to come down. I was in a foreign country; they did things differently here. Perhaps in Spain a man and a woman could experience that kind of intimacy without it carrying another – the other – meaning. I was young, inexperienced, and struggling hard to understand things I had barely mastered even in England. In the confusion, and partly to escape the anxious workings of my own mind, I had thrown myself into the music and Juan’s piece. Sitting at home playing the guitar for hours on end, trying to lose myself in the emotion of the composition, my mind still focused absolutely on her.

  We started the lesson and I began tentatively with the first chord. My fingers were often shaky at the start of the class; Juan was never hesitant to break in almost immediately with his first rebuke of the day, as though in protest at having to teach. But today there was a difference. As I continued playing for another minute or so there was complete silence where normally there would have been some degree of groaning, tutting, or simply an order to stop and start again. I couldn’t look up – I still needed to concentrate on the strings – but I knew, somehow, that for the first time I was playing the music from the inside, not the outside as had previously been the case, and that Juan was being carried along with me.

  I hummed the tune quietly under my breath as I played on, eyes focused on the strings. My playing had improved as a result of continual practising, I felt, and I wanted some recognition from Juan of my efforts. But despite my concentration, I was dimly aware of some other music starting from somewhere. At first I thought it might be a neighbour or a local bar turning on a sound system. Then slowly it became clear: it was another guitar, very gentle, almost inaudible. I glanced up quickly – Juan had begun to accompany me. It was unusual as I only knew Rondeñas as solos. He played harmonies; haunting, fascinating chords I had never heard before. Yet they fitted perfectly. His fingers moved effortlessly over the fretboard, sliding and stretching in incomprehensible combinations of notes, feeling his way around my playing, with no rhythm to guide him. In an ordinary moment it would have been impossible to follow me, to gauge my timing, to feel the piece with me. But this was a form of communion, an intuitive link between us, allowing us to perform in unison, producing something greater than our individual parts.

  We both looked at each other when the piece finished.

  ‘Ole,’ he said slowly and quietly. The hairs lifted on the back of my neck. Juan got up and went to the kitchen to make some coffee. I put the guitar down and stood at his window, looking down into the street. Ole. He had never said it to me before. It was the nearest I would ever get to praise.

  ‘You like it black, don’t you.’

  He lit the hob to heat milk for his own drink. The fire caught the remains of his dinner and the smell of fried garlic flooded the flat.

  There is an art to saying ole in flamenco, usually pronounced with the stress on the first syllable; only in bullfighting do you hear olé, with the accent at the end. You need both a technical knowledge of the music and an intuitive feel for the performance. Exclaim it – or its equivalents: arsa, eso es – at the wrong time, and at best you will be laughed out of the room. There are even flamencos whose speciality is the precise use of these terms – the jaleo. They stand or sit at the side of the stage trying to help the singer or dancer to perform their best. Vamos ya, ‘let’s go’, is for encouragement. Ole is reserved for that special emotional climax: the duende moment.

  ‘I think you’ve fallen in love,’ Juan said handing me the coffee. I blushed and pretended not to have hear
d. He didn’t press me and we sat down to continue the lesson.

  After some ten minutes spent polishing a few points and discussing what we might look at for the next class, the doorbell rang. Juan stood up and went to answer, disappearing from view into the hall.

  ‘Hombre!’ He gave out a stifled cry of surprise as the door opened.

  ‘Hello, Juan.’ It was Lola. ‘Sorry for not calling. I was in the area and I wanted to borrow your video of Belén Maya.’ Her voice was hard, like the one she used at school.

  ‘Yes, yes. Of course,’ said Juan. ‘Wait just a minute.’ He darted off into the other room, as wrong-footed as I was by her sudden appearance. I sat with the guitar in my hands, frozen, not sure what to do. It seemed odd that Juan hadn’t invited her in. Why had she come? The line about the video didn’t quite strike true. Should I let her know I was there? I wondered how she would react. This could be a great opportunity.

  But there was no need to decide. Before Juan reappeared she popped her head round the door, her smile framed by red tresses, and mouthed a silent greeting to me. I returned it with a grin of surprise, scrutinising her face for a clue. She winked, and returned to the door. She had known I was there all along.

  Juan walked past with the tape.

  ‘Here,’ I could hear him saying. ‘I didn’t know you were still studying.’

  ‘We never stop learning, Juan. Adiós.’

  And with that she was gone.

  I stood up and packed away my guitar as quickly as I could. I might be able to catch her if I hurried, I thought, but I had to be careful not to make it too obvious to Juan. Especially after his earlier comment. He came back into the room with a confused look still on his face. It wasn’t normal, this visit of hers, and he seemed to be struggling to work out what it meant. As he dithered, I took the opportunity to pay him for the class and begin my exit. We exchanged a few words – thanks for the class, same time next week, I’ll call you – and I headed for the door, all the while trying to resist breaking into a sprint. We said our final goodbye, shook hands and when the door closed, I threw myself down the stairs, guitar case crashing against the narrow walls. I had to find her. Which way would she have gone?