Duende

by Jason Webster

  Now there was the threat of higher rent. I had barely earned anything since arriving in Madrid. For months I had languished in depression, eating little, sleeping late, yearning for my easy Mediterranean life and the woman I saw then as the greatest passion of my life. Lost love. It had felt like a kind of death. I dreamed of her searching embraces, her breath on my skin. Just to see her once more. She wouldn’t even have to know I was there . . . But a sensible inner voice, the spoiler of so many ideas, would always hold me back, haunting me with visions of Vicente pressing a 12-bore up against his shoulder. I couldn’t take the risk. A complete break, Eduardo had said. Much as I hated it, I knew he was right.

  Occasionally I did some stand-in teaching for a nearby English school if the money situation got too bad, but I stayed in the flat because it was Madrid – the promised centre of flamenco, still driving me on – and it was the only place I could afford. And in some ways, too, because the dark awfulness of it reflected my mood. Now, after so much time and so many wasted chances, there was an opportunity to fall in with a real flamenco group. I couldn’t afford to pay any more, so I had to think fast.

  ‘I can sort out the electricity for you,’ I said, ‘as long as you promise not to put the rent up.’

  She looked suspicious. ‘What the hell are you talking about?’

  ‘If I sort out the electricity meter for you, will you promise not to put my rent up?’

  She sneered. ‘I never promise anything.’

  ‘Well, it’s up to you. I can guarantee a lifetime of low electricity bills,’ I said, trying to mimic the sound of an advert.

  Her dull, grey eyes brightened. ‘Really! How?’

  ‘Promise?’

  ‘Well . . .’ It was the most I was going to get out of her.

  ‘Have you got some old 35mm camera film?’

  She hurried off, slippers scraping in the grime, then returned with a film in her hand. ‘Will this do?’

  I grabbed a chair and climbed up to the meter above the kitchen sink. As long as it was the right make . . . I was in luck. Slipping the film into the tiny slit on the side of the box I was able to catch the wheel and stop it dead. It was a trick I had learned from Carlos.

  ‘There you go,’ I said, looking down. ‘An earthquake won’t make that thing turn now.’

  She looked hard. ‘What have you done?’

  ‘The meter won’t turn any more. I’ve blocked it. All you have to do is not answer the door to the electricity man, fill in a low number on the form when it comes round, and they’ll never suspect a thing. The cheapest electricity in all Spain.’

  ‘Oh, you are an angel,’ she said. ‘This is wonderful. We can switch on the fans, turn on the lights. And of course, you can play as many tapes as you want, my dear.’ And she tugged on my arm affectionately.

  ‘And the rent?’

  ‘Oh, don’t you worry about that. You can stay as long as you want.’

  It was the only time I saw her genuinely happy.

  Back at Carlos’s place. Despite not being officially taken on board, I continued visiting the flat almost every night. There was always someone there, and apart from Jesús’s reaction, I never felt totally unwelcome. If I was around for long enough, I reasoned, I would be regarded as part of the furniture.

  I usually arrived with a litre bottle of wine or some brandy if I could afford it. And a few packets of cigarettes. Ducados black-tobacco cigarettes were essential for anyone who saw themselves as part of the counter-culture. They came in blue and white packets, had a tar content as high as a cigar, and tasted like floor-sweepings dipped in diesel. But, most importantly, they were cheap and enjoyed a symbolic status not unlike Gauloises for the French. To smoke Ducados was to make a statement rejecting the system, and as such, they were as good as the official cigarette of the flamenco world.

  Most members of the band were as happy smoking them as they were breathing. There were exceptions: hard men, like Carlos, for whom even the venomous fumes of Ducados were not strong enough. He usually smoked cigars or, sometimes, Habanos filterless cigarettes. He said he needed them to keep his voice in shape. I tried one once and could barely speak for a whole day afterwards. But it left me with a greater fondness for a country respectful of its citizens’ right to poison themselves to death.

  Spaniards didn’t care much about smoking in public places. No bar waiter, belly straining behind the obligatory vest and white shirt tucked into tight, black trousers, was complete without a cigarette – usually a Fortuna or Nobel – hanging out of the side of his mouth, as he took out the rubbish at the end of another sweaty shift. Middle-aged women preparing the food in workers’ bars nonchalantly lit up as they whisked the eggs for another tortilla de patatas. There were even – and this pleased me the most – men in their sixties shuffling in their slippers and puffing happily away on thick Montecristo No.3s in the Vallecas supermarkets. It took the edge off so much bright, white packaging somehow.

  The other members of the group had gathered at the flat. Javier, a young payo dancer from Valencia, was standing on the balcony stretching his legs and seeing how high he could kick.

  ‘Look, I’m out of shape,’ he’d say as his toe touched the top of the door-frame. ‘And I’m getting fat.’ A tiny roll of skin round his waist would be pinched. ‘Look!’

  He had a slight build, narrow shoulders, a turquoise bandana in his hair, and an unnerving way of looking at everyone as though he were in love with them: head tilted to one side, eyes wide open, and a demanding smile.

  The other dancer was Carmen, a buxom woman in her late thirties with high blood pressure and dyed blond hair that came out a sort of thick, streaky orange. She was known as ‘La Andonda’, the knife-woman, for having attacked her husband with a kitchen-knife after she found him with another woman. The nickname came from a previous ‘Andonda’ from the nineteenth century – the explosive younger wife of the singer El Fillo – who was equally known for her knife-wielding exploits. Carmen’s situation had ended disastrously, Carlos later told me, and the husband had kicked her out – a catastrophe for a Gypsy woman. The community might well have ostracised her completely, but Carlos had taken her into his group because she was a distant cousin. ‘She doesn’t dance too badly, either, the fat old thing,’ he said.

  The other two in the group were guitarists. Antonio, the first guitarist, was a thin, young payo with dark blond hair and long sideburns who performed finger-breaking feats on the fretboard. Always clean-shaven, he wore fresh white shirts every day that quickly wilted and lost their sheen in the smoke-filled air of Carlos’s flat. Someone – it must have been his mother – even ironed his jeans. The other members of the band needled him in an attempt to bring him down a notch or two, but he fought back, always failing to receive the respect from the others he felt he deserved.

  Juanito, I was surprised to discover, was the second guitarist. At forty-seven years old, he was younger than I had thought, and his shortened right arm was the perfect length for playing. He told me it had been partially severed in a car accident and the surgeons had been forced to cut some of it away before sewing it back on. The result was that his hand fell exactly into the right playing position, and he was spared all the torturous straining and pins and needles that bedevilled the more ‘able-bodied’ guitarists. He could never play the complicated falsetas that Antonio liked to show off with, but he had the most perfect compás I’d ever heard.

  ‘Hombre,’ he said as I eased myself down next to him. We had gone beyond first-name terms, although, in contrast to payos, he never shook my hand or touched me in the way most Spaniards did. Gypsies seemed to have different ideas about physical space. He lit a cigarette, took a drag and then squeezed it into the gap between the strings and wood in the head of the guitar.

  ‘So it doesn’t get in the way when I’m playing,’ he said.

  As with every group, I later discovered, the hierarchy was everything. Antonio had been one of the founders of the band, and had even sought Carlos o
ut as a singer, but from the day he arrived, Carlos had been the leader, the jefe. As a singer and a member of the same extended family, Jesús was second-in-command. There was something distracted about him, as though his mind were elsewhere, on other, more important things, giving the impression that the band was not everything in his life.

  The others filled various middle-ranking roles, with Antonio jockeying for a higher position and always failing. He used his guitar-playing as a weapon in a political game, not realising that no matter how well he played – faster than Paco de Lucía, with more feeling than Tomatito – he would always be near the bottom. In the end I decided it was partly a gitano–payo thing, but I couldn’t help thinking things would be easier if he just stopped trying so hard.

  The flat was crammed with people. Apart from the group members, Carlos’s two teenage daughters and their friends were there, a handful of neighbours, and more friends from across the road. Every few minutes other faces would appear at the door, some staying, some just having a look and then moving on. At one stage an old man with a green hat and a purple face showed up and everyone stood up respectfully. How wonderful to see him.

  ‘Ostias, is that guy still alive? Look, he can still walk, how old is he? Did he make it all this way on his own? Oh, no, look, there’s his daughter, how terrible for her, having to look after him after all these years, she’s never been married, you know . . .’ She was nearly eighteen. Almost an old maid.

  We all went quiet. The old man lifted his hand, muttered something totally incomprehensible through toothless gums, turned and left. Cries of joy; some people clapped. What a great old bloke. Then we sat down again. I never did find out who he was.

  The noise was unbelievable. While other Spaniards would talk loudly and on top of one another at large family meals, here everyone was shouting, singing and screaming, usually with the TV on full volume in the background. One of Carlos’s daughters was even dancing to make her point to her neighbour. The result was a ceaseless cacophony which you either stepped inside or were overwhelmed by. As morning approached, I would often begin to doze off and find myself listening to the full crescendo of it all, like a wall of noise, rather than a particular voice or conversation. And I would throw myself back into the fray to avoid going mad.

  Jesús’s black, narrow eyes were staring at me from across the room. I felt his gaze like a tingling sensation in my shoulders, then turned to see him quickly look away. Nobody seemed to have noticed his return. He came and left with no questions asked. There was sweat on his brow and I knew he had been running.

  The women began clearing the table after another heavy broth – potaje. Carlos’s quiet, Indian-looking wife, María-José, made it by the bucketful, throwing whatever was to hand in a pot along with oil and water. Tomatoes and garlic were the only consistent ingredients I could detect, accompanied by anything from eggs, spinach and onions to broad beans, fish and chorizo sausage. On a good day you might even find some black pudding – morcilla – floating in it. Soaked up with bread, at least it filled you up.

  I got up to help, but was pulled down forcefully by Carlos.

  ‘Woman’s work,’ he said, drawing on the cigar stuck fast in his thick, full lips. Traditional gender roles were strictly adhered to. Juanito told me it was common in some houses for women to wait for the men to eat first before taking what was left over for themselves.

  ‘Pero aquí somo medio apayao – but here we’re half-payo,’ he’d say, almost shamefully.

  More cries and shouts as the table was cleared: ‘María, pass me the big dish, no the one by Juanito, fuck it’s hot, did you pick up the glasses, hey moza! I haven’t finished, you pig, you eat too much, and you need to fatten up, there’s no meat on you, what do you know, hurry up there . . .’

  Antonio had already pulled out his guitar and was playing the elaborate opening of a Fandango, showing off with modern, jazzy chords that stretched your fingers to breaking point. I felt Juanito squirm. Pedro had told me the Fandango was one of the palos with the strongest Arab influence. It was haunting, rhythmic, very distinctive, interweaving itself amongst the clatter of plates, screams from the kitchen and snippets of conversations slowly fading away. And then Carlos began to sing.

  Los arroyos cristalinos

  tu nombre van repitiendo

  las campanas repicando

  en la torre de una iglesia,

  el mío están murmurando.

  The crystal streams

  are repeating your name,

  while the bells ringing

  from a church tower

  whisper mine.

  The girls and many of the others had left. The music continued and cocaine was passed around. The drug made playing easier, increasing my self-confidence to the extent that I felt inspired on it. And the nervous energy it gave me meant the sound I produced on the guitar was more akin to the harsher, stronger style of the modern players I wished to emulate. Under the circumstances, I quickly lost any qualms about taking it. It was part of the lifestyle I was buying into, a necessary step, I told myself, in my search for flamenco knowledge.

  Juanito had become my main contact in the group. Without being obvious about it, he would always make sure we sat together so that he could guide me through passages I was unsure about, or teach me palos I had yet to learn.

  ‘Hey, try this,’ he’d say in his high, boyish voice. He played old tunes, standards, the sort of thing everyone was expected to know, yet no-one heard any more, because guitarists were all too busy experimenting, trying to find the latest jazz or funk sound. To out-Paco Paco. They were the sort of pieces you heard at weddings, festivals, on old records from the 1950s and 60s – a bedrock for most of the ideas in flamenco, but in danger of being lost these days.

  His thick fingers would move rapidly on the fretboard, producing an earthy sound that was almost non-existent now – most modern guitarists play ‘cleanly’, without the mistakes and buzz of tradition. He played a proper flamenco guitar too – spruce and cypress, no rosewood – with its harder, shallower sound.

  We spent hours like this: informal tutorials on the side that allowed me to get a taste for a more ‘Gypsy’ style of playing – often appearing to change rhythms and stressing off-beats. It might be five minutes, half an hour, or even the whole night, but whenever we were all together, he would find time to show me something. A chord variation or a little lick to throw into the middle of the compás just to vary it, to give it more life and a certain magic. It was invaluable, a crash course in the sort of things I would need if I was ever to have a chance of playing professionally with the group. But I had to be careful about what I said. If I started trying to ask him questions about the piece – ‘What was that? A minor?’ – he would withdraw, or rebuke me. For him you either played at the top, por arriba, or in the middle, por medio. Anything else went over his head.

  ‘Don’t talk to me in Chinese. We only speak Christian round here,’ he’d say.

  Carlos’s mother-in-law was a seer. Or, rather, she looked at the cards for people and came out with the phrases they expected to hear.

  ‘Blondy!’

  It was my turn.

  She leaned over me, gold teeth glinting dully in the low light. Her fat wheezing body was wrapped in a white scarf that she held tight at all times over her black and red blouse. One of her eyes was covered in an unnerving milk-like mist. I got up and joined her at the table as indicated.

  ‘Watch out for her,’ said Javier, flaring his nostrils as he stretched his leg up to his ear. ‘She might tell you things you don’t want to know.’ He spoke slowly, as if I couldn’t understand Spanish properly.

  The old woman handed over the cards for me to shuffle, then took them back with thick, grubby fingers solid with fat, gold rings.

  ‘You will marry a fair-haired girl,’ she proclaimed. Not a good start: I’d never been attracted to blonde girls and began to laugh. She realised her mistake.

  ‘Although you prefer dark-haired girls,’ she
said. That was more like it.

  She stared at the images on the wooden table in front of her. ‘You are waiting for something.’ She pointed to the card of the Suspended Man. I thought of Carlos and his promise of gigs some time in the future. Surely she already knew that.

  ‘If you follow my advice and pay heed to the omens, you will fulfil your destiny.’

  I sighed.

  ‘Soak a white handkerchief in your own sweat, wrap some jasmine flowers in it and leave it to dry on the windowsill for three days. On the third day, throw the flowers away, burn the cloth, and within the year you will be married and have witnessed the birth of the first of your three sons.’

  I flattered myself that the reading was one step further in the group’s acceptance of me, even if the woman did manage to extract 1,000 pesetas out of me for her wisdom. She grasped the money greedily and stared at the note to make sure it was real. I wondered who was laughing at whom. I justified my folly by thinking of it as an act of charity. But 1,000 pesetas was a lot for me now and I couldn’t afford to lose money so easily.

  ‘Make sure you listen to her and do what she says.’ It was La Andonda. ‘I did, and everything turned out good.’

  I looked at her. First, the woman’s husband had been unfaithful to her, and then she’d been thrown out of the house for trying to knife him. I decided to ignore the soothsayer’s advice.

  ‘You. Come with me.’

  Jesús beckoned to me with a casual flick of the fingers. I stood up, confused. He hadn’t spoken directly to me for days. As the lowest in the hierarchy, I had to obey. I walked towards him and he turned and headed out the door.

  We walked down the stairs and out into the dark street, orange and pink lights flickering over our heads. It was three in the morning, but the streets of Vallecas were full. A singing Gypsy woman was blocking the pavement, unconcerned by the wailing car alarm just thirty yards from where she stood. She had placed her home-made sound system – a 3-foot metal frame on wheels bearing enormous speakers, a keyboard and a microphone – in the middle of the path so that everyone had to cross the road to get past. It seemed an odd way to busk, but what with her flat, tuneless singing, cheap backing track, and the accompaniment of the high-pitched squeal of the Audi up the road, you had to wonder if her intention was to earn any money at all. People couldn’t get far enough away from her. I looked at her two sons crouching in the doorway behind her. They were dressed in grubby nylon tracksuits, with that proud, bored, menacing look of so many Gypsy kids.