Diós te había dao sabiduría.
Que una palabrita tuya
vale por doscientas mías.
Companion of my soul,
God has given you wisdom.
So just one of your words
is worth two hundred of mine.
THE GUITAR BARELY left my hands now. I felt its absence when it wasn’t there, searching for it in my sleep as I mentally rehearsed, fingers twitching over invisible frets. Playing became my main means of expressing moods and feelings, my hands naturally falling into palos or chord sequences that seemed to come from some previously unacknowledged part of myself – a more confident, self-aware yet vulnerable side of me. I’d wander around the villa working out new falsetas, or trying to perfect my rhythm, perched on a table or sitting on the edge of my over-sprung bed. The acoustics were particularly good in the loo, as the closed-in walls created a kind of echo chamber that made the music resonate through my entire body. The others laughed but with a tone of reproach – this was just a little too weird.
But playing, driving, or just stoned out of my head, a need was growing inside me. Subtle at first, I felt it only in short flashes or absent-minded moments as I was cleaning my teeth, waking up from a siesta, or feeling sunshine on my face for the first time in days and blinking heavily with eyes accustomed to the dark. Like a drowning man conscious only momentarily that he cannot breathe, passing the rest of his time unaware of his steady progress downwards, breathing water in place of the air he needs.
La Andonda realised there was something wrong, she could see that I was becoming restless. One afternoon she decided to teach me knife-throwing, presenting me with an old, rusty knife she had never used. We spent a couple of hours in the garden flicking it into the ground, she with a deft wrist action I had expected of her, while my own efforts resulted in the knife bouncing around in the dirt on almost every attempt. It was as though she understood that I needed something else, that I was no longer satisfied. And while I appreciated her kindness, there was more to it than the desire for a new distraction.
One afternoon I set off away from the villa, walking on my own into town. The sun was intense but I felt a need to get out.
The old baroque church with its blue-tiled dome was surrounded by soulless blocks of brick, five or six storeys high, punctuated by aluminium windows with cheap pink and green sheets pegged out to dry in the dust and sand. Stepping over an upturned, broken child’s buggy lying among a pile of plastic cups, I headed towards a phone box in the middle of the blanched, empty street. It was like an oven inside. I pulled out a handful of change and began dialling.
I hadn’t spoken to my family for months. After the initial surprise, they began filling me in on what they were doing, asking about my life in Spain. It was difficult to reply: I had told them little about what I was up to and now, just when I felt a deep need for conversation and to be able to speak to someone about what I was feeling, the distance that had grown up between us seemed insurmountable. It was a strange sensation: a strong desire to connect with my former home and a simultaneous awareness of how far away from it I had grown. I was in Spain now, this was my life, but I was isolated.
The phone went dead. I had no more change. Light-headed from the oppressive heat in the phone box, I stepped out into the street; into the piercing, exposing light.
‘Where’ve you been?’ everyone cried when I returned to the villa. ‘We couldn’t find you.’
‘Of course you couldn’t find me. I went for a walk.’ It was unusual for me to be sharp with them.
‘A walk? At this time? Estás chalao – crazy. Come in and have some potaje. María-José has just put it out on the table. We were going to start without you.’
I fell back into line and ate my soup.
It was our last gig of the night. I was already beginning to feel tired. Strange, as we were only really halfway through our day. The bus stumbled along. Carlos had drunk too much brandy, but it was the only way he could sing. Never sober – it just wouldn’t happen, he said.
We came to the edge of a town. Lights, blocks of flats, car-lined cicatrised streets. It looked fairly ordinary. A bump lifted us off our seats momentarily. I looked out of the window and saw we had crossed a little train track. There was a station. The name on it flashed by too quickly for me to see it, but I already knew – we were in Benidorm.
I gazed in horror as the familiar roads appeared on the other side of the glass: bars, English theme pubs, the infamous ‘Cally Londreez’, the beach-front lined with palm trees, the discos full of pink tourists sweating out all the lotions and creams they had smeared on their skins in the evening to sooth the burning of the afternoon sun. I was caught between wanting to peer at this past world and a strong desire to drop deeper into my seat and vanish. But my curiosity won, and I began scanning for familiar faces. I might catch Jonathan and Barry out having a late drink, or some of the characters from the town hall. I remembered my desperate flight away from here. I couldn’t expect a warm welcome if I did bump into anyone.
And then there was Lola.
I hadn’t thought about her for at least two weeks, the longest time since I’d left. The mixture of pain and passion surfaced with a jolt. We were not in Alicante, I told myself. Not Alicante. There was no reason for her to be here. She didn’t even like Benidorm. But my emotions wouldn’t listen, and were busy tightening their grip. We were a flamenco outfit. There was every chance that she would be drawn here to see a concert, would be sitting in the audience, was probably there already. I started to feel sick.
‘I saw Camarón sing here once,’ Carlos said. Everyone went silent at the mention of the great man.
‘He played out at the bullring. Gypsies there from all over. Everyone was going mad. It was incredible. People trying to get in any way they could. One kid tried to get in on a ladder and broke his leg when the security guard kicked it out from under him. It was like rising up to heaven and seeing the face of God.
‘Afterwards we all left and went out into the streets, full of disgusting white guiris falling over and being sick. I tell you, it was the worst experience of my life.’ Everyone grunted in sympathy.
‘Churumbel!’ he called back to me. ‘You must feel at home here, eh? Among all your compatriotas? How does it feel? Make you homesick?’ They all laughed.
‘Sure you don’t want us to stop off and pick up some “feesh and cheeps”?’ He pronounced the last words slowly and deliberately, his mouth unused to the foreign sound. I was surprised he had even heard of fish and chips.
‘Or shall we go to the chemist’s for some skin creams?’ More laughter. I was beginning to wonder if he was taking out his anger from all those years ago on me.
‘You’re gonna sit up near the front tonight – next to Jesús. There’ll be lots of guiris in the audience. They’ll love it. I want you to talk to them in guiri. Introduce us, that sort of thing.’
If Lola was there, I wouldn’t be able to hide.
The venue was on the sea-front, one of the hundreds of bars, cafés and restaurants that lined the esplanade. As expected, a lot, though not all, of the audience were foreigners. Some English, Germans, Scandinavians. I tried to explain to Carlos that it was probably not worth me saying anything. No common language.
‘These people are here to get pissed and have a laugh. They’re not interested in us,’ I protested.
He grunted and looked away.
‘Why else do you think you’re here?’ he said.
I was stung, but put it down to the brandy, and the memories of the night of Camarón.
Backstage, for the first time, I asked Jesús for some cocaine. He gave me some without hesitation, but there was a question in his face.
* * *
Carlos led us onto the stage, brandy bottle in hand, followed by Jesús, then me. I felt totally out of place, like a peasant invited to dine at the landowner’s table. This was against the pecking order – a pecking order which, tonight especially, I was more than happ
y to remain the same. The drug was giving me its usual lift; the comforting boost of confidence and rush of self-belief. But not for long. Its effects seemed to last shorter and shorter periods of time.
I stepped forward, scanning the audience for those large brown eyes, the flash of deep red hair, but saw nothing.
‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ I heard my voice, high-pitched and nervous, casting out like a thin, feeble net. ‘We are gathered here to hear one of the finest flamenco performances in Spain today.’ There was a titter. I blushed. The lights were hot, burning on my forehead as the warm air flowed in from the open door. More people were arriving, sitting down. A man and a woman. I peered into the dark, trying to see who it was.
‘Er, all the way from Madrid, the capital Madrid, for your very delight . . .’ The woman was standing up to take her coat off. I couldn’t see her properly. Damn it. If only she would turn around, I might be able to see her in profile. I peered again. From the back of her head, it could well be her. But there was a knock behind me – I was being told to hurry up.
‘Carlos and his Flamenco Friends!’
The audience clapped enthusiastically, more out of relief that the half-wit making a speech was finally finished. I slumped back into my chair, my mind wandering to that distant corner, and the female late-comer. I couldn’t see her at all now, there were too many faces in the way. Had she seen me?
The gig got under way. I had other things to think about, and the drug made it very difficult to concentrate on anything with any clarity. Antonio was playing the opening of the first piece, then Carlos started and we had to follow him, his pace and signals. I heard him filling the room with his low voice, screwing up his face in an attempt to create the necessary intensity; the emotional concentration that was fundamental for any flamenco performance, good or bad. Without it, the music simply became a meaningless cacophony.
Perhaps it was the thought that Lola might be there, or somehow reconnecting with my earlier life by arriving in Benidorm like this, but as I played, something unexpected happened. No longer the intense concentration of before. The mechanicality I had seen in some of the others – especially Antonio – I was beginning to experience myself. The same songs, the same rhythms, the same chords. I had played them all so often now, I could almost, almost, manage them in my sleep. We were all there, dressed in our uniforms, the only break of colour the ever-present turquoise bandana on Javier’s head and La Andonda’s red and white dress. She was clapping and calling out the words of encouragement – the jaleo – to squeeze out a drop of enchantment for this emotionally dead audience. Graceless as she was, she could do it sometimes – usually when she was annoyed with someone, dancing back at the villa. She would lift her skirt menacingly at the knee and thigh and fill us all with some strange, twisted erotic energy. But tonight? I doubted it. She didn’t look angry enough.
With a great rolling triple Antonio finished his falseta and Carlos took up the song once more. For the first time, I listened with a critical ear. I had never wondered what I thought of his singing before. My concern had always been to ingratiate myself with him, win his approval, to be accepted into his circle. But now as he sang, it dawned on me that this was really only a mediocre singer whose band I was in. His voice was flexible – he demonstrated that with his impersonations of other singers on the patio at the villa – but in concert? It was thin, sharp. It never moved me in any way. The facial contortions he performed to express feeling were only skin deep, but they did the job. Our audiences were mostly made up of tourists and ordinary Spaniards – who probably knew as much about flamenco as the tourists – or people at private parties more interested in the person standing next to them. The truth was, we were just so much entertainment, wallpaper – colourful wallpaper, but little more.
La Andonda was on stage. She had changed her clothes for the Farruca. Dressed as a man, she danced a male dance, stripped of the fiery hand movements with more footwork and a leaner line. Unfortunately La Andonda herself was not lean, and, squeezed into the tight-fitting black trousers and even tighter black top, she was all buttocks and breasts. She loved it, thought it was the best thing she did, but you could hear the collective groan from the rest of the group every time she stood up to waddle her way through the piece. The people here, at least, seemed to appreciate it, and when she finished the applause was tremendous. One man at the back even wolf-whistled. La Andonda lapped it up. But for the rest of us, it only served to demonstrate the ignorance of the audience.
‘We should get her and Javier to swap places,’ Jesús whispered to me.
It was important to have a crowd that knew and understood what it was listening to. A good performance was a dialogue, and could only be achieved if the audience understood its role. The band was the prime mover; but without something coming back, it could only play, dance and sing. There was nothing else – no passion, only an outer shell. Looking over at Antonio, his face dull with boredom, waiting anxiously for his next chance to show off, I began to doubt if this lot could ever produce anything special, whatever the circumstances.
‘The problem with this bunch is they don’t know how to listen,’ Carlos said as he sat down after his final song.
Yes, I thought, but do we really know how to play?
When we finished, the lights went on and I stood up quickly to get a glimpse of the woman in the corner. She was sitting with a drink in her hand, her face half-covered. But the hair was wrong. Too dark, not red. She put the glass down and caught me staring at her. I looked away. It wasn’t Lola.
We drove up the hill, away from the coast and out of Benidorm. This time I didn’t look out of the window, and allowed the streetlights, the bars and tourists to pass by unobserved. It was all dead to me.
The following day, Carlos called me over. He was sitting in his usual place on the patio, next to the jasmine plant that somehow, miraculously, had managed to grow and survive. None of us were looking after it.
‘Churumbel. I want to talk to you.’ His thick features glistened in the fading light, an oily film covering his skin as he drew on his cigar. I walked over to him. He sat back on his chair.
‘Sit down there.’
I sat.
‘Cigarette.’ It wasn’t a question.
‘You know what the most important thing is in all this?’
I shook my head.
‘Pasión. You’ve got to have passion.’
With a sense of guilt, my mind went back to the previous evening. Had my thoughts not been so silent after all? It wasn’t always easy to tell.
‘I was fourteen when I decided I wanted to be a cantaor. Course, I’d sung before then, but it was more like a game, childish. But one day my mother took my hand and said, “Son, you see that eagle up there. You know why he flies? Because he has no choice, because it’s his destiny, because he’s an eagle, and that’s what eagles do.”’
I was wondering where this eagle was supposed to have been. I didn’t know Carlos had been brought up in the middle of the Sierra Nevada. He seemed pretty urban to me. Still . . .
‘And she said, “You’re going to have to decide what you are. If you want to sing, you have to know it in your heart. You have to do it because there’s nothing else you can do. You have to do it because it’s what you are.”
‘And since that day, I’ve felt it here.’ He pummelled the centre of his chest with his fist. ‘Right here. And you know what, churumbel? Since that day, I can see it in others too. I can see if someone has it in their heart.’
He stood up and started unbuttoning his shirt to reveal an off-white, immensely hairy torso, half-covered by a greying vest. Removing the shirt completely, he handed it to me without a word.
I had heard of this. It was a way of symbolising acceptance, like sharing bread and salt in some parts of the Middle East. But it had always been described as an interesting anthropological detail. I had no idea it was still practised, and it took me a few moments to work out what was happening.
After
a moment’s hesitation, I stood up and took the sweaty shirt from him.
‘Thank you,’ I said, looking down.
‘What you did last night touched me. It touched me here.’ His fist was beating his chest again.
‘The way you stood up there and – I don’t understand guiri, but I know that what you said, you said it with feeling, with passion. And that’s what counts, churumbel. Last night you had feeling. I could tell from your playing. Don’t think I wasn’t listening to you. I can hear you, you know, even when you’re furthest away from me. But last night was very good. Last night was special.’
I crumpled the hot, damp shirt in my hands and looked up.
‘Now go and fetch me some more brandy.’
The shirt was the kind of admittance I had longed for. I took it gratefully, but there was a hint of insincerity about the act – a trait I recognised more and more in Carlos – which niggled at me. My fear was that I was only there for the tourists, as he’d said the night before; an adornment, or freak. A blond foreigner playing basic flamenco accompaniment for a two-bit band. But for my novelty value, I might never have got here.
Antonio was angry when he found out. Carlos had never treated him like that, and he was the principal guitarist.
‘I think, you know, he likes you.’ His main grudge was with Carlos, but he was annoyed with me too.
I sometimes wondered if Antonio wasn’t the real outsider. He wanted respect as a great guitarist and all he got were complaints that his compás was too fast or too slow. He practised a lot, working out ever more complicated falsetas to show off his skills. But it was a case of trying too hard, it seemed. Nobody wanted a manitas de plata – silver hands – in the group. It was all about singing and dancing and putting on a good show for the audience. The guitarists were just the musical background. There were times when the guitar element was important, but not many. This was not a modern flamenco set-up, where tocaores had become as important, or more important, than singers and dancers. It was a fairly traditional, basic flamenco that we played. Nothing too spicy, or innovative, or ornamental. Antonio simply didn’t fit in.
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