A Parrot in the Pepper Tree

by Chris Stewart

  Spanish buses were different in those days: they rattled and belched and you could open the windows, not that you would have wanted to on a night like that. It was cold outside the bus and the country beyond seemed a little threatening as we climbed inland towards Granada. The bus became my world and I began to dread the idea of leaving it. However, the decrepit old bus rumbled on through the night until at last we turned to follow the Guadalquivir valley and a constellation of lights appeared on the horizon. ‘Sevilla,’ growled the old man next to me, as the great city unfolded in a vision of industrial yards and slums.

  For months I had been longing to arrive in this city but now the real thing was before me, I would have given a lot to be somewhere else. At last, though, we burst through the crust of the suburbs and rumbled along a broad avenue lined with palms and gardens, stone fountains playing at the intersections; and through the stone arch of the Sevilla bus station. I tore myself from the bus and as I stood wondering what to do and where to go, an old man sidled up and whispered conspiratorially: ‘Hotel, very cheap.’ I followed him, not least because he had my bag.

  My guide hurried, wheezing, across a park before ducking into a narrow cobbled alley. The air was a heady mix of jasmine and urine, and a cloud of white moths fluttered around a street-lamp. Our footsteps echoed through the alleys as we turned the bends of a maze and found ourselves in a tiny square, in one corner of which stood a narrow, three-storey house.

  We entered in darkness. A fat man in a grey suit and dark glasses oiled up out of the gloom: ‘125 pesetas a night, or 175 full board, cold water only.’

  That sounded about right to me, so, with my old man wheezing, and the fat man puffing, and me carrying the bags, we climbed the stairs to the roof and my room. It was a whitewashed brick box with two beds and a chair and a couple of hooks on the door.

  I sank into the creaking bed and looked happily at the bare lightbulb. Here I was at last, established in Sevilla. Tomorrow morning I would step out and see the city.

  I was too excited to sleep much but must have dropped off eventually for in the morning there entered my dreams the sound of heavy steel poles being dropped on a stone floor. A tiny barred window illuminated my cell, casting a little patch of sunshine high on the wall. The steel poles fell thicker and faster until all the air around was ringing with the sound. I hauled myself up over the rim of sleep and wondered, in that vacuous way before your mind switches on, where on earth I could possibly be and what the infernal noise was?

  As I pulled my clothes on and stepped outside, I was almost blinded by the brightness of the morning light. All around were brilliant white rooftops, towers and walls; the sky was powder blue and my own rooftop was a maze of clothes lines and crisp washing. And then the steel poles revealed themselves, too — as churchbells; up here at belfry level, they were close and harsh.

  After a breakfast of coffee and toast smeared with raw garlic, olive oil and sobresada — that orange butter made from pig fat much appreciated in Andalucia — I stepped tentatively out into the little square, followed a cobbled alley hung with geraniums, and went to seek Sevilla. I passed into a slightly bigger square with four orange trees and a fountain surmounted by three iron crosses. It was perfect. Along another alley scented with jasmine and into another square, more elements were brought into play: some ochre in the white facades, a flower-filled courtyard and a long pool beneath the orange trees.

  I strolled, on one whim after another, up and down the alleys. They had names like Water, Air, Jasmine, Life, and each gave onto a plazuela, a little square, each more exquisite and lovely than the last. Swooning with a surfeit of beauty, I found myself standing before the colossus of the Cathedral and the Giralda, the great Moorish minaret that the Christians hung with bells.

  This glorious urban landscape was peopled by women, and men, more beautiful than I had ever dared imagine, and there was music all around: the sound of a guitar or piano practised behind an open balcony door, snatches of singing and clapping on the warm city air. The smells were strong, too: coffee, black tobacco smoke, garlic, the exhausts of mopeds, Heno de Pravia, the sweet cologne so many Spaniards use, and everywhere the scent of the thousands of orange trees.

  I walked around the city all day in a daze, missed lunch, and forgot that my feet were sore. Then as the evening cool took hold, I found my way back to the hotel square — Mezquita, it was called — in time for a supper of lumps of pig fat swimming in a lake of beans and cloves of boiled garlic, with wine, bread and an orange to round it off. It was ambrosia.

  The next morning I did some washing in a stone basin on the roof. It was pleasant slopping water about in the December morning sunshine. As I was ineptly scrubbing away, whistling a tune to myself, a figure emerged from the companionway that connected the roof to the rest of the hotel. She was a well-built woman in her forties, wearing high heels, a tight pencil skirt and a man’s white vest, and she looked at me in amazement.

  ‘What on earth are you doing?’ she asked.

  ‘Washing. I’m doing my washing,’ I answered, rather pleased with myself. I’d discovered on my journey south that this was an inevitable question and that if I so much as dunked a grey undergarment under some suds, someone, somewhere, was sure to pop up and ask it. With a bit of foresight I’d worked out the answer from my dictionary. My Spanish was pretty rudimentary but still my companion managed to get the idea across that I was to cease immediately because it wasn’t seemly for a man to wash his own clothes, and that henceforth she would do it for me. She took over straight away, and while she splashed about, I attempted to reciprocate by serenading her on the guitar. Even in my guitar-besotted state I couldn’t quite convince myself that the deal was entirely fair.

  My new friend was called Isa. She worked at the hotel and seemed to take something of a shine to me. Sometimes in the evenings, she would take me out to a bar with her younger friend Viki, who was plump and rather pretty and giggled a lot. They would take a lot of trouble dressing up for these occasions, emerging from their rooms in staggeringly high heels, fishnet stockings, deep-cleft cleavages and a few pots of lavishly-daubed make-up. The pair of them would look me over and pick hairs and crumbs and what-have-you off my crumpled shirt, and straighten my hair before declaring us ready. Then off we’d go, clacking and hobbling through the cobbled streets to some lowish sort of a bar.

  It was kind of Isa and Viki to take me on these expeditions, I always thought, as I couldn’t have been very much fun for them. The three of us would lean on the bar, where my companions would get maximum effect from their stockings and split miniskirts. They would gabble together, occasionally turning to shoot me a good-natured grin. I would grin back politely and return to grappling with the language.

  I wanted very much to join in their conversation, and kept working out things I could say to them with the aid of a pen and paper and a Spanish dictionary. But of course, by the time I had constructed a suitable conversational gambit, the moment had always passed, and I would be reduced to the sheepish grin.

  Still, I took a lot of pleasure from these evenings, and from the Mezquita generally. It was a noisy but friendly sort of place, whose other residents were mostly young men from the country, working in a factory just across the river. At our evening meals we would engage in a stilted intercourse of half-sentences, baffled grins and raised eyebrows. But, odd though it may seem, I must have been a social asset, for they too took me to bars.

  On one such outing, I found myself in a grotto-like bar full of students and smoke and lively chatter, when in strode a huge woman with such a powerful presence that the babble was suddenly silent. At her heels followed a tiny boy with a guitar-case bigger than himself. One of my companions dug me in the ribs and smirked. ‘Fat Lola,’ he said, and he indicated with his hands — rather unnecessarily — her shape.

  Fat Lola took a seat against the wall and a space was cleared before her. She took the light, yellow guitar from its case, and holding it almost at arm’s length among th
e folds of her great body, she sent her fingers wandering powerfully and easily across the strings. Some slight adjustment to the pegs and away she went. There was a reverential hush. Sharp arpeggios jangled from the strings. Her improvisation soared and swooped, moaned and wailed, and then rose to a roar as she beat at the instrument with the fastest, most flexible wrist I ever saw. I had never heard live flamenco guitar, and I was spellbound. The unfamiliar oriental ring filled the music with mystery and anguish, and the ease and power of her playing made it seem as if the guitar were playing itself.

  The song sank to a low repetitive moan, like a challenge repeated. One of the factory workers stepped into the space and knelt before Lola on the floor. Cries of ‘Olé!’ and ‘Anda!’ rose from the audience. The guitar coaxed and cajoled him, teasing the song from him, then all of a sudden he cried out as if in great pain. The cry became a wail and a deep moan, culminating in a long strained ululation. As he worked his way through couplet after couplet, he wept real tears. I was utterly transfixed.

  The next day I set out in search of a guitar teacher. I didn’t have to look far. Breakfasting on coffee and doughnuts in a bar, I found Xernon sitting next to me, a blond, chubby-faced boy, half-Mexican, half-American. He looked about twelve years old but he had a guitar-case with him and we got talking. ‘If you want to learn flamenco,’ he told me, ‘then you must stay at the Hostal Monreal; that’s where everyone stays. I’ll take you there if you want.’

  So I left my friends at the Mezquita — Xernon had been surprised to find I was staying at a brothel (as even I had begun to suspect after a few nights out with Isa and Viki) — and, swinging my guitar, walked to the Cathedral, where the Hostal Monreal stood on the corner. I gave my details at the desk to a woman called Mary, a pretty, soft-spoken Irishwoman who did the books, kept the staff happy and mediated with the rag-bag assortment of guests, most of them guitar students or dancers.

  Mary’s lover, José, was the owner of the place. He was to be seen at all times of day or night hovering about with a pipe-wrench and a deeply worried look on his face. He liked to fix the plumbing and his dream was to get rid of the scruffy clientele and fill his hotel with rich American tourists. Had he made a better job of the plumbing, he could probably have raised the paltry 175 pesetas he charged for ‘full board, cold water only?

  But the plumbing was in a class all of its own. To get the full benefit of the cold shower you had to lean against the tiles beneath the hole where the water dribbled out of the wall, and then by contorting your neck and shoulders you could guide the trickle to whatever part of your body required it. It was not the sort of thing calculated to arouse the enthusiasm of big-spending Americans.

  The Monreal had three floors with wooden balustrades overlooking a central patio with battered aspidistras and a dribbling fountain illuminated by green and red fairy-lights. On the flat roof were washing lines and two roof-huts, which were a little cheaper than the proper rooms. They were ovens in the daytime, while at night you needed a hundredweight of bedclothes to keep your teeth from chattering. I took one of these for a month and set about my mission.

  The guitarists at the Monreal were an international bunch and most of us were in our late teens or early twenties. Occasionally, however, a more experienced player would drift through to reminisce, do a bit of teaching or patronise us rank beginners by joining a session. Herb was the exception. A wiry American with a pony-tail sprouting beneath an incipient bald patch, he puzzled us all by managing to combine extreme old age (he was thirty-one) with a ham-fisted incompetence. I remember pondering in amazement his decision to take up guitar in the twilight of his life, and in the fog of youth I even asked him once:

  ‘I mean, hell, man, why bother!’ It was a phrase that would come back to haunt me.

  Practice sessions were held daily on the roof and the keener among us would sit up there playing for eight to ten hours a day. Of course it was the most beastly sound, with everyone running up and down different scales and loosening their wrists with noisy rasgueados, all on very loud, strident guitars. You couldn’t see the faces of the players, as they were hidden by washing; all you could see were the chairs, the trousers and guitars, though if you leant back you could look up through the sheets to the towers and balconies of the city, and the deep blue sky. Every now and then one of the chambermaids would come up and, under the guise of checking the washing, indulge in a little flirtation.

  One day, drinking together in a respite from the guitars, we all agreed that our rehearsal studio really was intolerable, and came up with some rules to make practice more fruitful. From then on, anybody who wanted to practise on the roof had to play with a sock stuffed under the strings until midday, and no player was to drink or offer wine before lunchtime.

  And so the routine was established. We would sit out the morning, feverishly blipping at our guitars until the bell tolled, when the socks were whipped out, bottles of wine produced, and the free ringing of seventy-two strings would begin again. Sometimes the routine would be broken by the arrival of an old man with a Cordobés hat, who had been teaching one of the more advanced players in his room. Then we would all listen spellbound as he tripped through a series of falsetas, dazzling us with his technique.

  Winter passed, and with the arrival of the first months of spring, white stars began to appear amongst the dark leaves of the orange trees and the first heat of the year began in earnest. In Tokyo and Los Angeles, temperature inversions create clouds of smog that hang for days over the city, choking people to death. In Sevilla, which is the most romantic city in the world, the heavy cloud of orange-blossom scent that envelops it in spring and early summer drives people mad with love.

  At the Monreal, the object of all our madness was Laura, an American who was learning to dance flamenco. She had curly chestnut-coloured hair, a turned-up nose and wide hazel eyes, and moved with the graceful swish of bamboo leaves in the wind. Everybody was crazy about her, but moving ethereally among the musicians she seemed to have no inkling of the effect she was having upon us.

  The air at the Monreal thickened with sexual rivalry and we rushed into combat with our guitars. The poor girl must have had little sleep for our interminable serenading, while during the day hopeful accompanists would line up to offer their services for her dance practice. Alas, I wasn’t even in the running for this honour, being easily outgunned by Xernon and the rest of the group’s virtuosos.

  It was an all too familiar tale but again it advanced my musical skills. One night I had been practising with Paul, a fellow student, down in the Maria Luisa park, when he began playing a light classical piece called “Romanza”, I listened with rapt attention. The tune was indeed romantic, utterly so, and touched with a deep poignancy, but most of all it was simple. I thought if Paul could give me a bit of coaching, I might soon get the hang of it and be in with a chance at last with Laura. Paul, who was gay and thus out of the chase, said he’d be happy to help.

  It wasn’t quite as easy to learn as I’d imagined but eventually I mastered the piece and had only to wait for an opportunity to perform it. None came. Each time Laura appeared on the roof one of my betters would muscle their way to the fore with some fiery flamenco piece and monopolise her for the rest of the practice. Meanwhile, I’d pick away at my “Romanza” with a dreamy expression on my face, from my stool behind the washing, with the likes of old man Herb drowning out my finer moments.

  I decided to take action. One afternoon when Laura had disappeared into her room, I followed and knocked timidly on her door. She opened it with a not entirely impatient look of enquiry on her face. ‘I’d like to play you a tune,’ I blurted. ‘I think it might help you to relax after all that dancing.’

  There was a pause. Laura smiled, a sad, slightly off-centre smile and replied. ‘Okay, but promise me it’s not that piece you’ve been playing all week on the roof. I really could not bear to hear you crucify that again… I mean, not right up close.’ And

  then she added, puzzlingly, �
�You see, that movie was just so beautiful and so upsetting and so, like, true, that I want to keep it fresh in my mind? Laura was clearly one of those people who believed in being cruel to be kind — an odd notion because I imagine most people prefer their kindness unalloyed.

  ‘Yup, of course, no problem… that’s fine,’ I managed to mumble as I backed off down the corridor. But even without the humiliation ringing in my ears, Laura’s comments had stumped me. What on earth was all that about a movie?

  Xernon passed me. He was struggling to hold back a smirk, then, realising I was genuinely in the dark, he stopped to elucidate. ‘You’ve been playing the theme tune from that French film, Les Jeux Interdits, you dork, didn’t you know?’ I still looked blank. ‘You know, that old black and white movie that has been showing down at Plaza Nueva?’ I shook my head. ‘About a poor orphan girl and her dead dog in occupied France?’

  Finally the smirk broke free, spreading across Xernon’s face like a rash. ‘Not exactly flamenco,’ he commented.

  Romance at the Monreal was a fine and character-forming thing. But what I had really fallen in love with was Spain. And having done so, what I really wanted to be was Spanish, or what I then imagined Spanish to be: olive-skinned and brown-eyed, a deft hand with a sharp knife and an orange, a natural guitarist, a Don Juan.

  As the months went by, I realised that I wasn’t going to cut it. My nose went English-red; I tended more to the reflective than the excitable; I was — let’s face it — a rotten guitarist; and my skills as a seducer were hampered by a tendency to mental paralysis when faced with the object of my affections. In addition, my money was spent. Sevilla was drawing to a close for me.