Andalus

by Jason Webster

  In the street behind us a religious procession passed, all brass band and hand-clapping as men in brown cloaks took it in turns to carry an enormous float with life-size statues depicting the scene of Judas’s betrayal of Jesus. The men rocked the float from side to side, or backwards and forwards, rhythmically to the music, as in a heavy primitive dance. Then more clapping came and the bearers would appear sweating from underneath, and change places with their mates. The party atmosphere seemed at odds with the tragic scene represented above their heads.

  Three Cordoban girls pulled away from the procession and walked past us, their long black hair, dark skin and low-cut blouses giving an Oriental pride to their beauty, and a deep, animal awareness of the power they had to attract. You could see it in their gait and posture; they were like elegant Nubians with their shopping towering up from their heads, conscious of being the most alluring creatures on earth.

  Zine looked straight ahead, unseeing, eyes pale.

  ‘There is sickness here,’ he said.

  SEVILLE

  ‘You sure your friend’s OK? He’s been gone a while.’

  I turned my head away from the stage and looked back through the cigarette and hashish smoke in the direction of the toilets to which Zine had disappeared earlier. Glancing up at a clock on the wall I reckoned he must have been gone about fifteen minutes.

  ‘He’ll be all right. Probably got food poisoning or something.’

  Amadeo laughed. ‘It’s usually us who get gut rot when we go to his country, not the other way round. Perhaps he can’t stomach all the ham.’

  I poured out more thick red wine into our scratched tumblers. I was worried about Zine. We had got over the worst of our fight in Cordoba, without actually having managed to apologize to one another, but he was still less talkative than normal and had spent the last couple of days moping around, barely lifting himself out of bed. This time, at least, he hadn’t protested when I insisted he shared a room with me. I still wasn’t sure what was wrong, but was convinced he was in no fit state to go cruising the streets of Seville looking for a ‘bed’ for the night. It might just be fatigue, I thought, or perhaps some stomach bug, judging from the amount of time he’d been spending in bathrooms. If he didn’t show signs of improvement soon I might have to get him some medication.

  He had insisted on coming with me to the flamenco tablao that night: having seen him look so rough all day, I thought perhaps he was feeling better and felt like seeing something of the city – Ishbiliya, the Moors had called it, and Zine still referred to it by the old Arabic name. On the way we had passed the Giralda, brightly lit above the orange trees and droppings from horses ferrying tourists in shiny black carriages. The bell tower and symbol of the city was the Almohads’ greatest architectural legacy in Spain – the minaret to the mosque that had previously stood where now the Christian temple took its place – sister minarets in similar style still stood in Marrakesh and Rabat. Thick and square, with geometric patterns in brickwork creeping up its sides, the Christian King Alfonso X ‘the Wise’, when still a prince conquering the city for his father Ferdinand III, had saved the tower from destruction by Muslims fearful of it falling into Christian hands.

  Across the square stood the Alcázar: Seville’s Alhambra – a lusciously decorated Moorish palace still used as a royal residence when the king came down from Madrid. Its delicate archways, pools of water and yeso plastered ceilings, however, had been built for a Christian king – Pedro the Cruel; this defender of the Catholic faith had the royal escutcheon painted on the walls of his bedchamber emblazoned with Arabic script proclaiming, ‘Glory to our Sultan Don Pedro, may Allah aid and protect him.’

  Zine had been fine for the first hour at the tablao, pushing his way towards the front to grab us a seat just under the little wooden stage. Then Amadeo had shown up, an old flamenco friend of mine I hadn’t seen for years – he was spending the weekend in Seville before heading back up to Madrid in the morning. The three of us managed to take over one end of the refectory tables that stretched the length of the hall, trying to ignore the hollering of some French language students behind us. Carboneras was a place to talk and drink while listening to the live performances in front, but the noise that night meant sometimes you could barely hear anything that was being played.

  Amadeo and I quickly caught up on each other’s news. He’d been on the fringes of a group of flamencos I’d known in the capital, but we’d never really got to know one another as much as I’d have liked. This would be a great opportunity. I knew he was interested in the history of flamenco and Spanish folk music. ‘Talking to Amadeo’s like talking to a book,’ they’d said of him. Who better to explain the Moorish influence on it all?

  Seville had been the musical centre of Spain for some thousand years. Court music had flourished in Cordoba, the caliphal capital, but when this started mixing with popular styles and new forms of music started being developed, Seville quickly took over as the musical centre of gravity.

  ‘When a wise man dies in Seville,’ Averroes said, ‘they take his books to be sold in Cordoba. And when a musician dies in Cordoba they take his instruments to be sold in Seville.’

  This proud, floral city, with its perfume of orange blossom and its bright, violent colours, seemed to live off music. A whole folk dance – Sevillanas – had been named after it, and you could barely hear a flamenco song without some reference to the Triana district on the east bank of the Guadalquivir.

  El río Guadalquivir se quejaba una mañana:

  Me tengo que elegir entre Sevilla y Triana,

  Y yo no sé dónde acudir.

  The River Guadalquivir sighed one morning:

  I have to choose between Seville and Triana,

  And I don’t know which way to go.

  For centuries Triana, a run-down area, like a dirty reflection of the imperial city on the opposite bank, had been home to Gypsies and workers, whose lasting legacy came from their music and dancing. It was not a romantic place: in fact some guidebooks warned you not to go there, or if you did, at least to keep a tight grip on your handbag. A few bars on the riverbank were cashing in on its reputation as one of the mother-districts of flamenco, but for the most part it was just a fairly ordinary place with little charm, and rather a disappointment after all the lyrics I’d heard sung about it over the years. Apart from a dance school in someone’s front room and a couple of shops selling bright red and yellow Sevillana dresses, with their long and rather kitsch frilly tails, there was little to show this was a flamenco heartland. Crossing back over the muddy river to the city centre in a freak rain shower, I had felt disappointed at not being able to perceive its supposed magic.

  Even though I’d been involved in flamenco for years, I had never got to grips with the part the Moors had had to play in it. I knew about the theories that the word flamenco itself came from the Arabic felah manju, or escaped peasant, and that ole, that most Spanish of words, was in fact a borrowing from the Arabic phrase wallah, or ‘By God!’, as I’d already tried telling Salud. But apart from that, I still wasn’t clear what the influence of the Moors on flamenco had actually been.

  ‘No-one’s clear about it. That’s the problem,’ Amadeo shouted in my ear above the din of Carboneras when I brought the subject up. ‘Flamenco’s an oral art form first of all, so there aren’t many written records to give us clues. Then it’s a mixture of Gypsy stuff, Andalusian folk music and some Moorish stuff as well. It’s almost impossible to separate all the different strands. ¿Me explico? You see what I mean?’

  Amadeo was the best kind of flamenco to my mind: a Bohemian who had seen some of the harsher sides of life, and had probably been led into darker parts of himself through the music. But he had come out on the other side with a deep love of life and a calm awareness that every day might be his last. His heavily lined face, the dark rings under his eyes and his volcanic voice were the kind of traits I’d come across often among middle-aged Spanish musicians, but behind it all there was somet
hing of a light that shone, like the appearance of someone who had not only lived, but learnt something too. I knew that for years he’d kept himself alive busking around Europe, on the Underground or in the street, with the odd gig here and there at a bar or pub: a kind of flamenco troubadour, picking up bits and pieces of musical knowledge as he wandered the world. His style of playing was a bit old-fashioned for some, but his sense of rhythm, they always said, was perfect.

  ‘Islamic music has styles, a bit like the different palos in flamenco,’ he went on. ‘They call them maqams, each one with its own distinctive key and beat. You know, like bulerías or alegrías for us. I’ve heard Mauritanian musicians playing the same rhythms as a petenera.’

  We both touched the wooden bench beneath us to ward off the evil eye as he mentioned the secret palo. Similar in structure to a soleá or a bulería – yet with one important difference – the petenera was thought by Gypsies to have some magical power about it, so that for years no-one recorded it or taught it outside a select group. Even mentioning its name, as now, brought out the superstitious in most people.

  ‘I think maybe that’s why we think of it as the “mother palo”,’ Amadeo said, straightening himself to let a couple of young girls squeeze past behind us and then waiting till they had moved on before continuing. ‘Any twelve-beat flamenco rhythm finds its origins in it, and it probably comes from Africa or the Middle East, but no-one is allowed to talk about it. You see what I mean? It’s taboo.’

  I nodded. Across from our table a group of Gypsies were sitting at the edge of the stage, a young man with typically long hair hunched over his cigarette whom I took to be a singer, and next to him a man of about fifty or more, dressed in a grey suit, with white shirt and crimson cravat, and grey boots of soft thin leather, a gold chain hanging loosely from his wrist, his hand resting on an ebony cane. Proud and composed, he looked at me for a minute as though there were some connection between us and smiled like a cat before turning to speak to his companion. It was a rare occurrence among Gypsies – more often than not they barely acknowledged your existence. But every now and again – it had happened to me perhaps two or three times before – some of them opened up and seemed to communicate on some non-verbal level.

  ‘What about the Gypsy influence, then?’ I asked, turning back to Amadeo.

  ‘This is exactly what I mean about the petenera,’ he said. We both touched wood again. It felt vaguely blasphemous mentioning the word twice in quick succession, especially as we were in one of the biggest flamenco tablaos in Seville, surrounded by hundreds of aficionados. I wasn’t sure if we shouldn’t get up and carry on the conversation in some private dark corner of the narrow Moorish alleyways outside, but then I remembered Zine. We would have to stay till he got back. I looked towards the toilets again: still no sign. Perhaps he was trying to chat someone up at the bar. Somehow I doubted it, though.

  ‘The Gypsies were responsible for the change in the palo,’ Amadeo said. ‘The shift of the first beat from the “one” back to the “twelve”. That’s how we get soleares and other palos from it. That’s their genius. Simple, but it changes the entire feeling of the music.’

  ‘OK,’ I said, trying to get back to our original theme, ‘apart from, er, that palo, are there any other obvious Moorish influences in flamenco?’

  ‘In Yemen I often heard tanguillos,’ he said. And with his tongue he began clicking the gallop-like rhythm of the flamenco song, marking the beat with his finger like a conductor. ‘Then there’s our instruments.’ He began to list them, ticking each item off on the fingers of his right hand, each nail a perfectly filed claw hardened and protected for playing with superglue. ‘Drums, trumpets, hornpipes and rebecs, the precursor of the viol family, all come from the Middle East. Tambourine? Pandereta comes from the Arabic bandair. The guitar? Comes from the Arabic lute. Can’t have flamenco without the guitar. And that’s largely Ziryab’s influence. See what I mean?’

  Ziryab had long fascinated me. A man who was reported to have brought toothpaste and chess to Europe in the ninth century, he was a musician of exceptional ability. His jealous teacher had had him banished from the imperial court in Baghdad when the young apprentice revealed the full extent of his talents at a concert before the caliph. Soon afterwards Ziryab ended up in Spain, a distant and politically independent outpost of the Muslim world, till then effectively cut off from the cultural flowering that was taking place in the Islamic heartlands. Settling in Cordoba as the emir’s court musician, he introduced the backwater Andalusis to the latest fashions from what was then the Paris or New York of its day: seasonal colours for clothes (dark in winter, white in summer); short haircuts for both men and women – veils and turbans didn’t become the norm until much later on; table etiquette; home furnishings; and of course, the latest tastes in music. This Beau Brummell of Al-Andalus, as he has often been described, also revolutionized the lute, effecting a major step into its development into the guitar by adding a fifth string. The original four had represented the classical humours; what was missing, according to Ziryab, was the ‘heart’. Over a thousand years later, the flamenco guitarist Paco de Lucía named one of his records after this ancient style guru in recognition of the debt flamenco owed him.

  Apart from this one extraordinary man, though, there were plenty of other echoes from the Arab world in Spanish music. A flamenco equivalent of the lyric filler ‘yeah, yeah, yeah’ was lolailo or lelele. Might it have come from the Muslim proclamation of faith La illaha illa-llah? The meaning had been lost, but the words sounded almost exactly the same. You could easily imagine some medieval Christian or Gypsy hearing Muslims chanting this phrase, then copying it, much as Europeans with no interest or knowledge of baseball today walk around wearing Yankee caps.

  Then there were the saetas.

  ‘Ah, now that really is an Arabic thing, pues,’ Amadeo said when I mentioned them.

  Seville was one of the capitals of saetas – haunting chants sung in honour of the Virgin or Jesus during the parades of Easter Week, their strange, twisting melodies with sliding quarter-tones sounding almost exactly like muezzin calls to prayer.

  Y las golondrinas quitaron

  las espinas a Jesús

  y no pudieron desclavarlo

  con sus picos de la cruz.

  The swallows picked

  The needles from Jesus’s hair,

  But with their beaks were unable

  To bring him down from the cross.

  Often you’d hear a reference to ‘those Jewish traitors’ thrown in just for good measure, as waves of melancholy and woe were whipped up into a kind of therapeutic mass public release of grief. A bit like the annual Shi’ite Ashura festivals in Iran and Iraq. Shi’ism, an early break-away branch of Islam, had never got much of a foothold in Al-Andalus, which remained decidedly orthodox, or Sunni, throughout its history. Yet the similarities between Holy Week and Ashura were striking: the death of a holy man – Imam Hussein, in the case of the Shi’ites – was marked by massive processions and public displays of weeping and self-flagellation. Another Muslim echo in the Spanish Easter festivities was the organization of the participants into brotherhoods, or hermandades. These cloaked figures with pointed hoods that masked their faces had been the inspiration for the get-up of the Ku Klux Klan, but originated in semi-secret religious societies in Al-Andalus: they still existed in Morocco today, taking part in processions of worship on feast days to local holy sites.

  ‘Saetas,’ Amadeo shouted in my ear as I strained to hear him above the sound of the new flamenco cantaor starting his set, ‘comes from the Arabic word ghaita. They used to sing them in the evenings to entertain the kings and caliphs. You can still hear them sung in some parts of Algeria. And they still call them ghaitas.’

  I smiled as I turned back to look at the performance on stage. The singer was slumped in his chair, and had adopted the usual round-shouldered posture to achieve the right resonance in the thorax. His hair glistened under the spotlights from the wet
-look gel he’d smeared onto his scalp before coming on. I loved these little nuggets of information about Spain, these anomalies, where the Christian and Muslim elements of the country quietly and secretly interlocked and welded together. The whole thing might have been labelled Catholic today, but there was no doubting the Moorishness both of flamenco and of the Easter Week celebrations. The legacy was there if you looked for it; all it took was to peel away some of the disguise. Rocks, gems: one of Musa’s jewels to observe and admire.

  ‘The Church, of course, knew about all this Moorish and Gypsy influence on music. That’s why they banned certain scales. The flamenco scale – the one we use, right? – that was banned by the Inquisition. They said it was the work of the Devil. Ha! Just because we jump three semitones. ¿Me explico? Can’t do that, they said.’

  He gave me a look that suggested such restrictions were never very far from being reinstated, as though the authorities were always on the lookout for ways to impose more limitations on us.

  ‘I went to Valladolid about ten years ago when they were having their annual fiesta,’ he said. ‘Matajudios, they called it. A festival celebrating some ancient massacre of the Jews. Can you believe it? Some things take a long time to change.’

  Perhaps a few months earlier I would have been more shocked at this, but now it seemed to fit in well to the complex picture of absorption and rejection I was piecing together.

  A quick glance at Amadeo’s watch brought me swiftly back to the present: half an hour, perhaps more, had passed since Zine had headed off to the toilet. Too long for just an ordinary case of the runs. He’d hardly drunk anything either. I wavered for a moment between going off to investigate and giving him a few more minutes. If he was still in the bathroom he was bound to be in the kind of state where no-one – least of all me at the moment – would be welcome. Lifting my head up above the late-night crowd, I tried once again to see if I could spot him at the bar or in some other part of the tablao, but there was no sign of him.