ONE OF THE THINGS that had prompted Ana and me to settle in Andalucia was our shared love of flamenco. Before arriving here we both had visions of going off to Granada for all-night sessions at flamenco clubs, while I nurtured the idea of reviving the guitar-lessons of my youth at the feet of some local maestro. In the event, we’ve seen an awful lot more shepherds than guitarists during our time here. Either it’s been too hard to find someone to look after the animals, or we hadn’t wanted to haul Chloë into dark, smoky bars, or the money just wouldn’t stretch. In fact, the sad truth is that most of our exposure to the top-notch Andalucian players has been through tapes kindly sent by friends in Madrid.
As luck would have it, though, Chloë has developed her own love of flamenco dance – or, to be more exact, a love of Sevillanas, the castanet-clacking fare of every Andalucian fiesta. From an early age she would stand spellbound at the front of a stage, studying every movement of the dancers. Later, when we bought her first flamenco dress, it thrilled me to see her swirling, clapping or stomping along with them. I had hoped that her enthusiasm might have prompted her to pick up the guitar but, sadly, she has resisted all my attempts to interest her in the instrument. Sadder still, and painfully resonant of my Seville days, she appears to prefer the accompaniment of a cassette tape to her dad.
The local maestros all failed to materialise, too. None of the country folk who would occasionally stay for a drink and a tapa on our terrace showed the slightest inclination to pull down one of the guitars which hung on our walls. Even Domingo, who seems able to turn his hand to anything, proved oblivious to this part of his heritage. ‘Me da igual,’ he said, using that bleak Andalucian phrase – ‘it’s all the same to me’ – when I got my guitar down and asked if he enjoyed music.
So, when Ben rang to say he’d like to come and stay, and would be bringing his guitar, I skipped like a lamb. ‘That’s great, Ben,’ I burbled. ‘Yes, by all means, come just whenever you like, and stay for good.’
Since I had never met Ben before, the offer, as Ana pointed out, was perhaps a bit rash. But I had heard about him. He was the nephew of a very close friend in London and had come to Spain to do just what I should have been doing: learn proper flamenco technique at a guitar school in Granada.
Ben arrived the morning after his phone call and before the sun had set on his dusty yellow 2CV he had become that rare thing, the indispensable guest. He was utterly disarming – tall, blond, with a cultured air and aquiline nose – like some character washed up by the sea from the classical world. For three weeks he dazzled us all: Ana with his conversation and charm; Chloë by being fun and introducing her to a whole new set of tricks and clapping games; and me with his guitar playing, which filled me with inspiration. During his month at flamenco school Ben had picked up an impressive repertoire which he played with an easy fluidity, and the lovely sound of his guitar washed over us all like a stream across a bed of pebbles.
El Valero is made for guitar music: ‘If I were really rich,’ I had often thought to myself, ‘I would employ a minstrel.’ Ben was the next best thing, but a few months earlier I had in fact almost acquired a minstrel. His name was Ángel – and it suits him, for I have met few souls quite so ethereal.
I ran into Ángel one winter evening, near the house of a Muslim family at the top end of the valley. ‘You wouldn’t by any chance have a job for me, would you?’ he asked.
‘Well, I can give you all the work you want,’ I assured this gentle-looking spectre. ‘But I’m afraid there’s no money to pay you. Why, what do you do anyway?’
‘Well man, I play guitar and I can sing, and I guess I’m something of an artist – and I’m really good at yeso, plastering.’
I was a little taken aback. Did Ángel really think that Iwould pay him to play guitar and sing to me – or even pay him to paint me pictures? Yeso was good – I could always use some plasterwork – but as I had said, I had no money for pay.
‘I suppose the guitar playing would be quite a bit cheaper than the yeso work?’ I enquired, idly.
‘Oh yeah, man. I mean I really wouldn’t charge a whole lot of money to play guitar for you.’
I sat in silence for a minute, taking this on board.
‘When do I start?’ asked Ángel brightly.
‘I’m sorry, Ángel. I’d love to be the sort of guy who can employ a guitarist or an artist or a minstrel, but I’m afraid it’s not going to happen in this life.’
I went on my way, leaving Ángel a little crestfallen.
Not long after Ben’s all-too-brief stay, I signed up at the guitar school in Granada. This wasn’t just Mr Toad-like suggestibility, but an emergency measure for the harmony of our home. Ana and Chloë, having sampled the higher plane of Ben’s playing, were having a bit of difficulty adjusting back down to the earthier terrain of my own. Ana particularly was reaching the end of her tolerance of my constant practice sessions and would resort to acts of virtual warfare, ranging from the gratuitous use of a coffee grinder to incitement of the animals.
Then, one day, she cracked completely. I had been explaining how lucky she was to have a guitarist like me about the place to fill the house with sweet music – a little provocative, I own – when she turned on me.
‘Chris, I really don’t think you can call that music!’ she said. ‘It’s absolutely intolerable and there’s not a woman on the planet who’d put up with it. Bobble’obble’obble’obble all day long…’ And she gave me a passable and even funny, imitation of a guitar doing a bad tremolo.
It took the wind out of my sails and I laughed. ‘It’s not funny,’ she growled, keeping the tone censorious. ‘What I suggest is that from now on you go and practise in the study or, better still, the sheep shed, and then, when you’re good and ready you could give us a recital – once a week, at the most – and Chloë and I will listen, and maybe even clap.’
I turned to Chloë. I know it’s wrong to put your daughter in the middle of a serious domestic rift, but this did also concern her. Her musical education was, after all, at risk. ‘What do you think, Chloë?’ I asked – she was sitting at the table concentrating rather too closely on her schoolwork – ‘Do you think that’s fair?’
Chloë looked distressed. She hated being placed in such a delicate diplomatic position. ‘No, Daddy,’ she mumbled. ‘It’s not.’ Then with her hand disguising the giggle that was about to erupt, she added: ‘Those poor, poor sheep.’
And so it was that one midwinter afternoon I strode out with my guitar and headed for Granada. I arrived in Orgiva just too late for the bus, so I walked out of town and stuck my thumb out. It was years since I’d last hitch-hiked but within three minutes I was speeding along, chatting away to a young Granadina on her way home to the city from a holiday in the Alpujarra.
The light was fading as I slogged my way up the Cuesta del Chápiz, where the school stood at the top of a steep cobbled hill. The climb warmed me a little; as the sun dropped behind the rooftops a wicked chill had crept through the streets of the city. Behind the great wooden door of the Escuela Carmen de las Cuevas was a pretty patio with pots of aspidistras and a little stone fountain. In the patio there milled about a motley gaggle of girls and boys, weaving uncertainly among each other’s guitar-cases, wondering which language to speak.
At forty-eight I wasn’t quite the old man of the class – that was Jean-Paul who was well into his fifties – but the rest were much younger: weekend musicians, students, drifters, a clown from Munich. They were a nice rag-bag of bohemians. However, I felt the discrepancy in age acutely. Images of Herb from my youthful years in Seville came flooding back and with them the slightly paranoid idea that my fellow students saw me as an anachronism, someone who had wandered onto the wrong stage set. Whenever anyone addressed a question or comment to me I couldn’t help but feel that there was another question lurking beneath its surface – ‘Hell, man, why bother?’
I even thought I detected an odd sort of look from Nacho, who ran the place, when I went into the office to register. Leaning my guitar against the wall I smiled indulgently when he asked which course I intended to take. ‘Well, I’m certainly not a beginner,’ I assured him. ‘I mean I’ve been playing for almost thirty years.’
‘So what are you, then…?’ asked Nacho.
A certain modesty, almost certainly misplaced, made me hesitate to put my name down for advanced class. ‘I suppose I’d better go with the intermediates,’ I said self-deprecatingly.
‘Right, then,’ said Nacho. ‘Ten o’clock tomorrow, you’ll be upstairs with Emilio.’
I went off, a little hesitantly, to the flat I had been assigned and, sitting on a chair in the icy kitchen, started practising for my first encounter with Emilio. In the other room I could hear the German clown, Horst, who had signed himself up for the beginners’ class. Horst was getting a nice rounded tone from his guitar, and his tremolo was deliciously smooth.
I started into some thumb exercises that I hadn’t done for years, and soon realised just what a slob my thumb had become. Next I did some gruelling rasgueado work, shooting each of my four fingers down hard across all the strings, making sure the little finger and the ring finger came down as strongly as their big brothers.
It was cold and getting colder. After an hour I could feel a nasty pain setting into the tiny muscles at the top of my ring finger. A nagging pain.
‘Horst,’ I called out. ‘Let’s get out of here, go find something to eat…’ Horst, whose playing had been getting more sluggish and frozen by the minute, emerged stiffly from his room. We exchanged polite pleasantries about each other’s playing, and headed out into the icy night to scour the Albaicin quarter in search of sustenance.
Horst was what the Spanish call pesado – a little ‘heavy’ or earnest – not unlike the clowns I’d known in the circus. Still, once we had found a restaurant, and a bottle of red wine was on the table, we both eased up, and soon I was hooting with laughter at his Teutonic line in scatological jokes.
That night, however, I was troubled by strange dreams in which Emilio and the intermediate students featured. We had run into a group of the intermediates on the way back from dinner. They were Americans, apart from a cheerful chap from somewhere in the bogs of the Low Countries, with the appealing name of Ale-Jan van Donk. Among the Americans were a couple of Californians called Brent and Kirk, and a very tall man called Elin, who looked a bit like a warlock with his cloak-like overcoat and mane of shiny black hair. He looked even stranger in my dream, with long white fingers topped with plastic nails, and a hooked-back thumb – actually a not unusual deformity of flamenco guitarists. Crazy with energy, the dream Elin rapped out his rasgueados with those powerful plastic nails, with a sound like machine-gun fire.
My own dream playing was strangely doleful. I fear the technical term for it might have been geriatric.
It was with a certain trepidation that I pushed open the door of the classroom. The Californians were already playing and looked self-consciously cool as I entered and asked if this was Emilio’s class. ‘Yeah,’ they said in unison and got their heads back down to their playing, crisp and neat, with perfect compás – rhythm and accents in all the right places.
Ale-Jan came in a few minutes later, grinned at me, looked a little disconcertedly at the Californians, and raised an eyebrow. And then at last the great man, Emilio, pitched into the room. A wiry gypsy with horn-rimmed glasses, long thinning hair, darting eyes and what looked like a cruel smile, he looked us over briefly, then clapped his hands to silence the guitars. ‘Right! Alegrías. You all know it. Let’s go!’
And they were off, or at least Brent and Kirk were off, ripping into a fast staccato piece. Ale-Jan and I awkwardly fingered our instruments. I didn’t know Alegrías at all, and if I did I certainly wouldn’t be able to play it like that.
Discreetly I slipped my guitar back in its case and sneaked cravenly out of the door before the piece had finished. Down the stairs I crept and into the cave where Nacho was putting the beginners through an alzapúa exercise – playing the string with both the downstroke and the upstroke of the thumb. He looked up at me and my thirty years of guitar playing with an amused but friendly grin and paused the class. ‘Welcome, Maestro!’ he greeted me.
I wanted to disappear into a corner but that was impossible. The cave where the beginners did their stuff was used for dance classes and the walls were lined with mirrors. This made my humiliating entrance all the more humiliating: not only could I see all those humble beginners looking up at me, but I could see myself seeing them seeing me, as if in a simultaneous re-run.
I took my place, though, and a few minutes later drew some comfort as Ale-Jan slunk in. I wasn’t the only pretender.
The days of practice unfolded as we novices strived to follow Nacho’s instructions, and to pick out the sound of his own playing amid our own. This wasn’t easy since we all seemed to be playing just slightly out of sync, and as Nacho explained a finer point, there always seemed to be some silly bugger loudly practising the bit we had just learned.
Still, when we played through a piece we were learning together in a sort of sloppy unison, it seemed we were really quite good – an illusion that was shattered each time Nacho pointed at one of us to play alone, and it turned out that most of us really hadn’t a clue.
The most confident-looking among the beginners was a Frenchman called Jean-Paul, who introduced himself as a professional musician. However, he refused to play on his own at all. ‘I am a very timide personne,’ he explained. ‘I know zees stuff but I need to practise before I can play wiz zeez people.’ Rather than rely on memory or observation, he chose to record the lessons on a very high-tech machine, to pore over once he got back to France. I had a listen to his recording of the first lesson – the one with my entrance – and it was hideous, the cacophony multiplied so that you couldn’t make out a single useful phrase.
Strangely, Jean-Paul seemed to have a contempt for flamenco method and would repeatedly bring the lesson to a halt: ‘But Nacho, zat ees a ridiculeuse way to make zat sound. Ees very more easy when you do eet like zis, non?’ Then he would propose his own inept version. He kept this up all week. ‘Wiz four fingeurs?! But zat ees clearly completely impossible, nobody can do zat wiz four fingeurs – neveure. It is bettaire to do eet wiz three, comme ça…’
Nacho maintained an admirable patience, explaining over and over again the techniques, while Jean-Paul would release an oath and with a Gallic shrug look round the rest of the class for support. But we were all with Nacho, and over the fortnight, most of us began to make real progress.
I certainly felt that I had improved, even though I was playing through the pain barrier, as the unaccustomed work gave me a hideous pain in the little muscles on the top of the finger, and my nails, worn thin by ceaseless playing, started to crack up.
At the end of the course, my nails actually required superglue to keep them in place. But I’d achieved what I came for. It was time to return to El Valero and impress the womenfolk.