Duende

by Jason Webster

  ‘It transpired that someone had told him at a petrol station many years ago that English cars could bring good fortune. “As you can see I’m sixty-seven years old and I didn’t touch your car at all.” He was right there. Not sure if he was right in the head though. I thought about telling him that my car had been broken into three times in its checkered career, but he’d walked away by this point. I always knew Spain was a richly primitive Third World country in disguise.’

  ‘Can one learn to tell stories?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, yes. I should think so. But what do you mean?’

  ‘Well, do you find people just have a natural talent, or can you develop it, learn storytelling techniques?’

  ‘You must learn to relax. That’s very important. It’s important not to worry about getting it wrong, or falling flat. You learn, and hopefully do it better next time. Or the time after that, or the next. Just keep going. Practice is all important. And you can always improve.’

  My mind turned to the gruelling lessons with Carmen as Grace began another anecdote about her travels. Only half-listening, I heard the words ‘Bangkok’, ‘masseur’, ‘wedding’.

  ‘You married him?’ I asked as she paused for breath.

  ‘Oh heavens, no. Why on earth would I want to do a thing like that?’

  She lifted her glass to finish off her drink. On her finger was a thick silver ring, enormous really, with a large reddish-brown stone inset, and Arabic writing. The waiter placed another couple of full glasses beside us.

  ‘But you should try it,’ she said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Telling stories. Try telling me a story. Now. From your life. Or it could be anything. Just try.’

  ‘Grace,’ I asked, ‘what did you mean when you said that thing about the guitar – in the Generalife, that it was playing me?’

  ‘It’s about who’s in control,’ she said. ‘Excuse me.’ And she got up to find the loo.

  I looked around the café. Some of the waiters were watching our table suspiciously. A young man and an old woman slowly getting drunk together. They didn’t like it. It wasn’t normal. I turned my eyes away, and silently cursed the rigidity of it all, the deeply conservative seam running through this country.

  ‘Did you know,’ Grace said when she returned, helping herself to another cigar, ‘Gypsies spit at someone who has something that they covet. It’s to ward off the Evil Eye. They believe envy brings on the Evil Eye, so they spit to deal with the envy. You can’t envy someone you’ve just spat at.’

  I was dubious. I had never come across anything like this.

  ‘Another drink?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes. Go on then.’

  But we didn’t have to call the waiter. He was already upon us, standing over the table like a crow.

  ‘We’re closed,’ he said, in broken, angry English. ‘You must go.’

  I looked at him startled. We had been to this bar before, and it had often stayed open well into the night. The man was obviously lying. I replied in Spanish.

  ‘Pero, qué dice? You never close this . . .’

  ‘You must go!’ he repeated in English, the blood rushing to his face.

  I sat still, refusing to budge, but Grace was already on her feet, moving out from the table. She put her coat on, pulled her bag from the bench, and then, very determinedly, turned to face the waiter.

  ‘Could you tell me where I can find the bus station,’ she asked, her voice steady, not a hint of the litres of booze she had drunk that afternoon. ‘You see, I have to travel to Málaga to meet some friends, and I wasn’t sure if there was a train, or another way of getting there. I would like to arrive before it gets too late.’

  ‘Yes, of course, señora,’ the waiter said, and began giving directions. I watched the conversation out of the corner of my eye, still furious at the man. But within moments he was smiling, and from being rude and confrontational, had suddenly become friendly and helpful. By the time we were walking out the door, he was positively overflowing with good humour. I still wasn’t quite sure how it had happened.

  ‘It’s much more difficult to be angry towards someone you’ve helped out in some way,’ Grace said. ‘Goodbye.’ She kissed me on the cheeks and turned to go. ‘I have to catch that bus,’ she said. And she strode off confidently towards the corner where a man with a beard and a trilby hat was waiting for her. She slipped her arm through his and they disappeared.

  Some time in December, I received a phone call from Alicante. It was Lola.

  ‘Hello, guiri.’

  Her voice was frothy.

  ‘We’re going down to the Sierra Nevada to do some skiing, and I thought I might pop into Granada to see you. God knows why.’

  ‘Of course. But . . . how did you know where I was?’

  ‘Oh, I asked your journalist friend. He told me you’d run away from Madrid. We’ve become quite friendly.’

  Eduardo had told me nothing. I didn’t even know he’d met her. I might have felt betrayed, but I was curious.

  A week later we were sitting opposite one another in a bar in the Albaicín.

  ‘Why did you come here, for the love of God? I mean, why not Guadalajara, or Oviedo, or Cáceres, or some other happening town? It’s dead here. The only flamenco here is what they put on for tourists. You know what that’s like. Horrendous!’ She articulated the word slowly and lovingly.

  I couldn’t explain. So much had happened since we split up. And there were things I didn’t want her to know.

  ‘Just a whim,’ I said.

  ‘A whim, eh?’ She looked me hard in the eye, then down at the table. ‘You seem to do quite a lot in your life on a whim.’

  The reference was clear. I was being made to feel responsible.

  ‘Look, I . . .’

  She held up her hand to stop me. ‘Don’t talk about it! It’s finished.’ And her wide, full mouth forced itself into a resigned smile.

  There was a pause, until we both started talking at once, and then stopped.

  ‘No. You go ahead, guiri,’ she insisted.

  Her persistent use of the word annoyed me, but I carried on.

  ‘Did you come here with a group of friends, that was what I was about to ask you.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘You said “we” were coming skiing.’

  ‘Oh! No, I came with Vicente and the kids.’

  It hit me like a train. With her husband? After everything, all the talk of leaving him?

  ‘We often come here in the winter.’

  I remembered the lunch at their flat, and the mild, tame woman serving food dutifully and politely. They had been an ordinary couple that afternoon.

  ‘I take it things are OK between you two,’ I said, forcing the words out. A hundred barriers were falling down across the table between us.

  ‘Oh yes. Yes.’

  ‘I’m glad.’ I fell into a closed silence as I realised she had used me as a plaything, a distraction from the real relationship in her life. For all their unsuitability, she and Vicente were strongly tied to one another, by the school, their children, and their need for sex. What she sought were lovers, and only when her sexual needs were being satisfied by someone – myself, Juan, who knows how many others – could she ever contemplate leaving her husband. In the end, though, for all her talk of flamenco and her free spirit, she didn’t have the courage to do it. She would be with him for ever.

  ‘And you,’ she said. ‘Got any girlfriends? Any nice Granadinas here for you? You didn’t choose well coming here, guiri. They’re all ugly as sin down here.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What – no they’re not ugly, or no you don’t have a girlfriend?’ She leaned forward. ‘Have I hurt your feelings? Have you got a little Conchita tucked away here somewhere?’

  I had barely looked at another woman since we split up, and felt, even now, that I might never love again with such intensity. It had been the most romantic and passionate experience in my life, and the emptiness I had felt whe
n the relationship ended had only been filled by pushing myself to a drug-charged extreme that had left me feeling dry and barren. My friend had died, and others who I had counted as friends had cast me out. Apart from Grace and the dance classes, I was lost, barely recovering from the emotional highs and lows of the past two years, looking back on Alicante as the best of times, a period I could remind myself of to soothe my melancholy. Yet here she was, mocking me, mocking our relationship, mocking what for me had been a life-changing experience as though it were nothing, and had meant nothing to her. I wanted to get up and leave. A quiet inner voice inside urged me to stay.

  ‘Actually, I’ve got three on the go at the moment.’

  ‘Three!’ She laughed at the joke. ‘You are keeping yourself busy!’

  ‘Yes. It’s the blond hair, you see. Makes me stick out in a crowd.’

  She laughed again. But had nothing else to say.

  ‘So how’s everyone else?’ I asked. I wasn’t interested, but it was worth saying.

  ‘Fine. Pilar gets madder by the day, and Rafael is still as boring as ever. But I don’t see them as much any more.’

  ‘And Juan?’ He was the only one I wanted to hear about.

  She looked intensely at the tablecloth, and drew her nail forcefully across the grooves of the weave.

  ‘He left,’ she said finally. ‘Shortly after you . . .’ She sighed. ‘I don’t know where he went.’ She looked up, and I nodded. Then her head bent forward again.

  ‘He left a note. Said he was sorry.’

  We chatted for a little longer about inconsequential things, until finally unable to stand it any more, she looked at her watch and announced she was leaving.

  ‘I told Vicente I was coming down to do some shopping.’

  Even now she had to lie.

  We kissed each other goodbye, with a squeeze on the arms just to register something between us, even if it did now belong to the past. And she walked away, among the dark, narrow streets, her hips still swaying musically under her dress, and her dark red hair blowing gently off her face.

  ‘I met up with an old lover the other day,’ I said.

  Grace’s eyes lit up.

  ‘Oh really? Tell me.’

  ‘She wanted me to feel guilty,’ I said. ‘She was making me feel guilty, even though there was no reason. So eventually I decided I wasn’t going to feel guilty, or angry or anything else I didn’t want to. And it sort of worked. At least I was able to see it happening.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, knocking back her glass of red wine. ‘We often congratulate ourselves on things we observe. But what about all the gaps in between? What’s happening then, between our observations, I wonder.’

  ‘El Niño Ricardo told me once how he sent his son to learn guitar with the father of Paco de Lucía.’

  Despite being a doorman, Emilio loved to talk about people in the flamenco world, most of whom he appeared to have met. I suspected he might be a member of the Peña Platería, Granada’s secretive flamenco club, which employed a closed-door policy to outsiders.

  ‘Antonio had it right – the kids had to practise all day every day. It’s like a job, just like anything else. Anyway, Ricardo knew there was little life left in him, so he sent his son to Antonio Sánchez, told him to teach the kid what he knew. And you know what? The kid came back after a month saying he couldn’t take the pace. Good player, but without the slog, he was no better than anyone else. That’s what makes Paco so great: he stuck at it, worked at it.’

  He knew I loved to hear these insider tales, and would simply carry on, like most Granadinos when they were on a roll.

  ‘I met Sabicas when he came back to Spain.’

  Sabicas, the great flamenco guitarist, autodidact and almost mythical character, was in exile for most of the Franco dictatorship, living in New York and Mexico, only returning to Spain for visits towards the end of his life.

  ‘Everyone was waiting to hear him live. But, you know, flamenco is in the air round here. You live for too long cut off from that and it shows, no matter how good you are.

  ‘So he went back to New York, and he was dying there, so he went to the peña they have for aficionados – used to go a lot. And everyone’s playing, so he decides to join in – he always liked to show off, Sabicas. But he played badly. Everyone knew, but they didn’t say anything, because he’s Sabicas. But he knew, and he went home annoyed and locked himself in the house and practised and practised without coming out. A whole week. Then the next week he goes back to the peña and plays the best gig of his life. Everyone was amazed. Someone even recorded it on video. But you know what? That night he went home and the next morning he left feet first.’

  I felt more at ease at the dance school now. Juana treated me as one of the crowd – I could tell by the way she corrected me if I made a mistake: less harsh, more playful. And in addition to his flamenco tales, Emilio would give me late-night tutorials on local recipes, or the flowers and wildlife of the Sierra Nevada. His impression of an eagle soaring through the valleys looking for food was particularly memorable, as he pounced on his broomstick pretending it was a snake.

  Meanwhile Juana drove Carmen on and on. I would sit in, playing as ordered, often spending the whole session going over the same passage again and again, my fingers clicking into a kind of hypnotic rhythm as they went through the same movements a hundred, two hundred times. For Carmen, though, it was more difficult. She was being drilled and Juana never slackened the pressure. No encouragement, no words of praise. She seemed to want to grind the girl down, as though engaged in some war of attrition. Obsessive perfectionism, I thought, but I had already been warned not to make any comments.

  My discomfort with Juana’s methods increased, however, as I saw the raw, spirited girl begin to change. The quality we had all praised her for, her energy and maturity, was ebbing away. Hammered by a barrage of instructions, she quivered with fatigue, her face often straining and hard now, no longer breathing life into her movements as she once had done. And whereas before it had flowed, naturally and easily, too much concentration was now creating a tension that left her dancing dry and lifeless.

  I watched it all from my corner. Sometimes I put more life into my playing, just to try to spur her on when the pressure seemed to be getting too much. I wanted to see that spark she had when I’d first seen her, and thought perhaps by giving something to her with the music, I might help draw it out. Even just a chink, to see that it was still there, and might still be brought out of her again.

  ‘Compás! Compás!’ Juana would shout, and I knew she wanted me there as a musical metronome. Keep the rhythm. Nothing else required.

  In desperation I tried to catch Carmen’s eye, to smile at her, or give her a signal of some sort. But battered into submission as she was, she stared ahead faithfully at the mirror, eyes unmoving, only too aware of the watchful gaze of Juana. Any drop in attention would be seriously criticised. And then, after the class, she would simply pick up her bag wearily and head straight out without a word, her hair flattened down, stooping under the weight of her own body. To me, Juana began to take on the appearance of a sadistic school mistress, secretly taking pleasure in the destruction of her pupil.

  ‘I want her to audition for the Conservatory in Madrid,’ she said one evening after another drubbing of her student.

  ‘The Conservatory?’ I asked. ‘She’s a flamenco dancer, not a ballerina.’

  ‘She is a dancer,’ she countered. ‘She could be a great dancer. She has potential. It is up to me to prepare her.’

  ‘But the Conservatory? Why not the Amor de Dios school? That would be far more . . .’

  ‘Dancing is dancing. If she works hard enough she will be able to pick it up. Other flamencos have gone on to classical dance and come back to flamenco. It is never lost.’

  I shook my head.

  ‘Hey! Listen to me!’ She raised her powerful voice to a shout. ‘You don’t know what it has been like in this country for flamenco. For years they
have laughed at us. No-one takes us seriously. But now we can prove to them we are every bit as good as the rest of them. They cannot simply treat us as old-fashioned folklore any more. Amusing, yes. Good for the tourists, the odd performance before the king, just to remind him that we’re still here. Those days are finished. We are serious dancers, as good as the best of them. Good enough to go to the best schools and turn the laughter back in their faces.’

  ‘And you . . .’

  ‘Look at Joaquín Cortés,’ she said. ‘He’s just the beginning. A flamenco who trained in classical dance, and now fills the biggest theatres in the world. That’s us, that’s what we’re doing here.’

  I had looked at Joaquín Cortés. He was everywhere with his trademark naked torso – on TV, in magazines, doing world tours, filling the gossip columns with his private life. But as his status grew, his spirit seemed to diminish, and I felt he spent more of his time on stage demanding the adoration of his audience rather than winning it with his genius. That was not flamenco, at least not in my mind. Not the stardom of Joaquín, nor the strict discipline of Juana. I loved flamenco because there was something free about it, something ineffable. A spirit that could not easily be defined, captured or possessed. For me, Joaquín Cortés had lost whatever duende he may have had, and Juana was quickly forcing it to flee from Carmen by driving her too hard, not giving her the time or space really to dance from within. There were other options, other avenues for a promising young dancer. But it was pointless saying anything. Juana would simply not have heard.

  One evening Juana was called away halfway through the class, and for the first time, I found myself alone in the studio with Carmen. She was tired, as usual, and took the opportunity of the unexpected break to crouch down and catch her breath.

  ‘How’s it going?’ I asked.

  ‘Worn out.’ She lifted her head.