Duende

‘THIS IS A classy newspaper. Bloody bible for most people out here.’

The Costa Gazette was based 30 miles or so up the coast in the tourist mecca of Benidorm, formerly an attractive fishing village that had quickly lost its essential character after the discovery of its special ‘microclimate’ and the beginning of the tourism boom. With the Fifties came the town planners, and the village’s three elegant bays were soon draped in concrete and dissected by arrow-straight roads.

Foreigners were thin on the ground in Alicante and I enjoyed the genuinely Spanish life there. Going to Benidorm would feel like I was letting myself down, almost like returning to England itself. But Eduardo was urging me on to try my hand at journalism. I needed to get out more, he said, broaden myself. Learning the guitar wasn’t enough on its own.

Eduardo had met Barry, the editor of the Costa Gazette, a handful of times. The paper frequently rewrote material from local Spanish-language newspapers, translating and summarising to fill its own news pages, so there was something of a debt owed. We planned simply to turn up and take it from there. Picking up a copy of the paper from a newsagent, though, I began to wonder if the whole thing was really such a good idea. It was a bizarre hybrid of local news, results from the amateur bowling league and soft porn. Not a world I expected to slot into easily. But I was beginning to understand something of Eduardo’s intention. In his view, becoming a flamenco was all a question of being able to slot into anything at any time, if possible. Working as a journalist would be part of the course.

‘Each palo is different, has a different feel,’ he said, ‘and every time you play it, it’s different. As a guitarist you are going to have to be able to move in and out of each one, bringing whatever is necessary at each moment to bring out the best performance in those around you – the dancers and singers – and even to lift yourself as well.’

It seemed odd to think that working on a local ex-pat rag might help me develop as a flamenco, but my guru had spoken and I dutifully followed, led, not least, by a degree of curiosity.

We decided to make a day of it, travelling up on the ancient, smog-bellowing trenet – which chugged up and down the coast so slowly it was surprising when it actually reached anywhere. We were surrounded by Germans, Swedes, Dutch and English, all soaking up the much-needed winter light. The low, white sun shone brilliantly in our eyes, reflecting off the shimmering sea beneath us, as we inched our way along beaches and clifftops. Opposite us sat an Englishwoman, a long-term resident, and her friend who had come to visit for a week or so. No English reserve here, I noticed: far from murmuring quietly so as not to disturb the other passengers and keep her conversation private, she raised her voice unselfconsciously above the din of the engine and the dozen other voices echoing around the carriage. Spain, it seemed, could have a radical effect on foreigners.

The train shuddered up the coast, pulling beyond the built-up areas of Alicante, past Pedro’s house, San Juan and out onto the cliffs perched over the clear water of the Mediterranean. Looking out the window, I felt I had never properly understood the term ‘sea-blue’ until that moment. It was an infinitely rich, passionate experience of colour, deeply satisfying, the shifting tones of turquoise and purple contrasting sharply against the yellow, white and green of the rocks and trees around us.

Just before we reached our destination, the mustachioed inspector, complete with peaked cap and missing shirt button, arrived to sell us our tickets. Eduardo and I paid up reluctantly, irritated at having come so close to a free ride. A Scotsman grunted, handing over the largest note he thought would cover it. The Englishwoman opposite struggled to get the tickets she wanted using sign-language, pidgin Spanish, and clearly and loudly spoken English. The inspector couldn’t understand what she was saying, or at least he was giving nothing away. Eduardo and I intervened and translated. As the beleaguered inspector moved on the woman leaned over: ‘You know I’ve lived here for twenty years and I can still barely say a word.’

No wonder the ex-pats needed their own newspaper.

The offices of the Costa Gazette were on a narrow street no more than a hundred yards from the sea-front, in a low building set among soaring white towers with orange and green sun-blinds flapping in the breeze. We climbed the dim stairs, entering what seemed to be a collection of holiday flats, cheaply constructed and producing a permanent sense of unease from the thought that they might collapse at any minute. It felt like entering a house of cards.

The newspaper offices were shabby. A teenage girl sat in reception behind a beaten-up old desk, wrapping papers with a sulky look on her face. She said nothing, but gestured with her thumb for us to enter the main room. Walking through, I almost fell as my foot caught in the gaping holes in the dirty brown carpet. Inside the main office piles of papers, clippings and negatives littered every surface. It was small and cramped and dingy. Everything was a dull, nondescript colour. A few curious eyes peeked up to ascertain the source of the break in the monotony, then looked down again, satisfied that we posed no threat.

After a moment or two, a cheerful woman with thick glasses and a northern English accent approached us and asked if she could help. Eduardo explained we wanted to see the editor. Half-expecting to be told to return later – editors were, after all, busy people – I was surprised when we were immediately taken into what looked like a kind of glass and wooden shack in the corner of the main room. Glamour photos of busty women adorned the walls. Some of them looked familiar from copies of the newspaper I had read before coming. A middle-aged man with a bright yellow silk shirt and lazy, bored eyes stood up.

‘Eduardo, my boy. Always a pleasure.’

I shook his hand.

‘Barry,’ he grunted.

We sat down, sinking into a corner on a low sofa.

‘What can I do for you two gents?’

Eduardo took the initiative, speaking quickly in an authoritative, colloquial Spanish, which somehow seemed to shift the balance of power. He explained he was here to introduce me, a journalist friend of long standing who was looking for work in Spain. I sat quietly, trying to look engaged, as my attention wandered from buttock to breast to buttock again along the row of pin-ups.

‘What’s your background, then?’

I tried to say something, but Eduardo butted in, racing on with his big sell. A string of untruths was elaborated, detailing my professional record – editor of the university newspaper, contacts in Fleet Street – and I nearly choked when I heard that I was married to one of his journalist colleagues.

‘Oh, lovely!’ Barry’s dull eyes lit up at this point.

‘Well, Jason. I’d be happy for you to come in a couple of days a week for a trial period,’ he drawled. ‘But I can only pay the usual rate: five pesetas a line.’

I nearly choked again. Was he joking? Two pence a line? But a dig in the ribs from Eduardo held me back. I nodded my approval politely, and the interview came to an end. We shook hands and left.

I was glad to get out of there. Barry’s odd eyes bothered me as my attention oscillated between the conversation and the incredibly large breasts of a woman in a lime-green G-string pinned to the back wall. Eduardo tried to reassure me about the job.

‘Don’t worry, son. They’ll be asking you for more and more in no time. And the pay will get better. You’ll probably be running the place in a few months.’

A week later, I returned for my first day. I was introduced to Jonathan, the only full-time journalist working there. A slight, narrow-shouldered man with a mild manner and an undisguised look of fear in his eyes, Jonathan made up for the lack of other hacks in the office by swilling a steady flow of San Miguel beer and smoking eighty cigarettes a day. So strong was his addiction to nicotine, that his whole family once had to fly to their holiday in Florida via Iceland so that he could have a mid-Atlantic puff.

Jonathan was a good journalist, though. He’d previously worked at a selection of national papers in England, and had once famously exposed police complicity in a smuggling racket in Gibraltar. The photos he’d taken almost cost him his life, and, in his rush to get away from the mobsters, he had lost his contacts book. Over time, this notebook had taken on mythical qualities, and everyone from King Juan Carlos to the Mayor of Marbella could have been called directly ‘if only Jonathan hadn’t lost that bloody contacts book’. Family responsibilities had led him to seek something more settled, and he’d ended up as the news editor at the Costa Gazette. Over the following months he showed me the ropes.

‘Here, boy. Let me look at your nails.’

We were not having a good lesson. I had cancelled one class as a result of commitments at the paper, and Juan had not been impressed when I told him the reason.

‘Oh, I see. So you’re off all over the place like a stupid guiri, while I’m trying to teach you something serious here. Eh? You don’t think I came out of retirement just to be messed about?’

In my own mind, although Juan was teaching me how to play the guitar, Eduardo was closest to being my real flamenco teacher, bringing me up to speed on such things as history, regional variations, and something of the philosophy of simply being a flamenco. Juan could take me through the motions, but Eduardo, I felt, could show me what it all meant. I needed them both and wanted to avoid conflict at all costs. But Juan had begun to push me even harder in our lessons now. No more simple Rumbas – Bulerías had been passed over for something more ‘fun’ – now I was expected to do things with my fingers I had never thought possible. Every class, he came up with a handful of incredibly complicated chords for me to learn. These required twisting my hand into ever more excruciating positions, and I was convinced he was enjoying the pain I was suffering.

‘Enough Gypsy Kings,’ he said. ‘Serious flamenco from now on. Now you’re mixing with all those guiris up in Benidorm, you’ll be wanting to do Verdiales, or Sevillanas – all the touristy stuff.’

I looked up. Despite the months of practice, I still felt like I couldn’t really play anything anyone else would want to listen to – without either being paid or heavily sedated first. But Verdiales and Sevillanas were great party pieces, the sort of thing your Aunty Marjorie would be able to clap along to.

‘Well forget it,’ he said. I groaned. ‘It’s time for a Soleá, the Mother Chant.’

The Soleá is supposedly named after a female singer in flamenco folklore called Soledad (the d’s, already softened by Spanish pronunciation, almost disappear when uttered by Andalusians or Gypsies). A slow and emotive style that often seems to evoke the ‘loneliness’ of its title, it forms, along with other palos – Seguiriyas, Polos and Cañas – the backbone of the ‘deep song’ of flamenco, the cante jondo. Singing is the first principle of flamenco, and deep song, as any aficionado will tell you, is what authentic flamenco is all about; it is the heart, root and soul of the whole art-form, the least accessible to outsiders and the sound most likely to produce duende. It is what takes the listener closest to that charged, primitive experience that seems like an echo from an older, lost age.

‘Deep song is imbued with the mysterious colour of primordial times,’ Lorca once famously said in a lecture he gave before the 1922 Granada festival. ‘Its notes carry the naked, spine-tingling emotion of the first Oriental races.’

Palos that fall outside the deep song category are often referred to in lighter terms as cante medio, middle song, or cante chico, baby song, or even sometimes as cante flamenco, as though deep song were something distinct from flamenco altogether. All these can produce duende in their own right, but there is a kudos attached to deep song amongst flamenco circles, where the jondura – the depth – particularly in the Seguiriya, makes it revered as the aristocrat of all the song forms.

There are singers who specialise in deep song, as there are those who are known principally for their Tarantas or Tangos. But a guitarist is expected to move in and out of each palo with ease; one minute slow and emotive, the next fast and rhythmic, like a fiesta.

Juan began to play mournfully, a look of pain on his face, counting the twelve-beat rhythm out loud as the music lurched forward.

I listened intently, my eyes fixed on the guitar as I concentrated on his technique. But another part of me was secretly cursing him. His moodiness was beginning to annoy me. I didn’t want to learn Soleá at that moment. It just didn’t feel right and I secretly wished we were doing something else. And now, as it was my turn to copy him and play what I had just heard, my fingers kept catching on the treble strings in the complicated double arpeggio movement.

‘Here. Show me your hand.’

I stopped and reluctantly held my right hand out towards him.

‘OK. I thought that was the problem. Right, put your guitar away.’

Confused, I did as he said. We were only halfway through the lesson. This was unusual, even for him. What was going on? Was there something wrong with my hands? Perhaps he was about to tell me I had a fundamental problem with my fingers which meant I would never be able to play the guitar at all. Hesitantly, I placed the instrument in its case and turned towards him.

‘Right, boy. The rest of this lesson will be dedicated to nails: how to look after them, file them, strengthen them, everything.’

I laughed with relief.

‘Hey! What are you laughing at? You think I’m joking?’

I shook my head obediently.

‘Some guitarists have been known to turn violent if their nails broke. Someone cut off my teacher’s nails when he was sleeping and he almost burnt the guy’s house down. The police stopped him in the street carrying a fire-bomb.’

I laughed again.

‘I’m deadly serious. Here, look at mine.’ He thrust his hand forward. It was fine and sinewy, delicately manicured so that not a single nail was out of shape, each one shining with varnish, the thumb nail filed at an angle to give better purchase on the strings. The skin was soft and white, as though never used: no cuts, no roughness, not even at the knuckles.

‘Now look at yours.’ By contrast mine looked like a road-sweeper’s. ‘Right. Let me show you what to do.’

Over the next hour we filed, glued, varnished, refiled, sprayed, blew and generally pampered ourselves like a couple of tarts on pay day. If ever Juan needed a job on the side, I was sure there were plenty of people who would spend a fortune for such treatment. He had turned the simple care of the human nail into a craft on a par with art restoration. At one point I thought I was even going to get a silk job – when thin pieces of silk are glued onto the nail to give it strength. But after much twisting and poking, he decided mine were healthy enough.

‘Just be careful when opening tin-cans and that sort of thing,’ he said. ‘Start using your left hand for ordinary tasks. Your right hand is sacred.’

I nodded in bewildered agreement. I was beginning to have doubts about this. All I wanted to do was play the guitar, for heaven’s sake. But he hadn’t finished. There were the finer points of filing to master. It all depended on the shape of your own nail and how it related to the rest of your finger. Each one might be different, as was the case with my unfortunate hand. He filed, I put my hand in position on the guitar, he tutted, he filed again, I assumed the position, more filing – sometimes just one stroke at a time – then back to the guitar. It was endless.

‘Always file in the same direction. Otherwise, disaster!’ There was no irony in his voice. ‘And never, ever cut them. That’s fatal.’

We finally came to an end, and, to my surprise, the arpeggios were now much easier. I was converted on the spot.

‘Thanks, Juan. I just had no idea . . .’ I said.

‘That’s fine. But you must look after them now. OK? You must learn to love your hand, your right hand. And your left. They are your tools. Without them you won’t be able to play our beautiful music.’

A call came in. A fire at a hotel in Benidorm. I was told to go and investigate – my first real story. Rushing out with a notebook and camera, I got to the hotel and dodged past security to find everyone lying by the pool as though nothing had happened. There were certainly no signs of a fire. A few people told me someone’s dustbin had caught alight and they had all been evacuated for a few minutes, but that was all. My heart sank. Some story.

‘Which paper are you from, love?’ asked an old Liverpudlian woman. It was a great chance to advertise my employer, I thought. I might win a new reader.

‘The Costa Gazette. It’s . . .’

‘Never heard of it. You should work for a proper paper like the Sun.’

I went back to the office. I had been gone for two hours. Barry was not impressed.

‘You took your time. Went for a stroll by the beach, did you? Still, wouldn’t blame you. Heh, heh.’ And he rubbed his hands together lasciviously.

I explained I’d had difficulties but had some great quotes.

‘You shouldn’t have bothered,’ said Jonathan. ‘We usually just make them up.’

As the weeks passed I was gradually initiated into the murky world of local journalism and the even murkier one of the ex-pat community. Whole subcultures had been created, where each nationality had its own schools, bookshops, newspapers, travel agents, doctors, lawyers – anything where you might want to avoid having to deal with any of the natives. For the readers the paper, as Barry had said, was a bible: absolutely required reading to survive in what was certainly perceived as a hostile environment. Underlying it all was a form of racism, a deeply rooted idea that at heart all ‘dagoes’ were corrupt and dodgy bastards, only too ready to pull a fast one on innocent foreigners. The ex-pats didn’t come here for the people or the culture, they came for the weather – the warm, sunny winters – and they did their best to recreate life in the Youkay here on the Costa. The British class system was alive and kicking too. Torrevieja, to the south of Alicante, and to some extent Benidorm itself, were working-class ghettos where folk with little more than a state pension would settle in search of a better life. North of Benidorm – Altea, Jávea and Moraira – was the reserve of the golf-playing, middle-class and professional elites. Not that even they could compete with the gaudy wealth of the Costa del Sol . . .

Spain did rub off on the English in one respect, however: the development of their own argot, formed from seemingly random, mispronounced Spanish words. I first encountered this when I called an English bar-owner in Benidorm to get some details about a break-in the night before.

‘Not much damage,’ he said. ‘But of course they had to break the rackers to get in.’

‘Rackers?’

‘Yeah, mate. Made a right mess of them, they did. It’ll cost me a tidy sum to get those fixed.’

I could hear stifled sniggers from Jonathan opposite. I had no idea what the bar-owner was talking about.

‘Just where were these rackers, then?’ I asked.

‘Where they always bloody are! Where else are they gonna be?’ He slammed the phone down. I turned to Jonathan, who by now was quite beside himself.

‘What the hell are rackers?’ I demanded.

‘Rejas,’ he said, wiping the tears from his eyes. ‘He means rejas – window bars.’

In a flash I understood. The Spanish word – pronounced ‘rekhas’ – had been anglicised into ‘rackers’. I could see that a knowledge of English and Spanish was not going to be enough. There was a third lingo to learn: ex-patese. Over the months I picked up as much as I could. Houses, it turned out, were always referred to as ‘cazers’ (casas), especially when in the countryside, when they became ‘cazers del campo’. You never lived on an estate, but an ‘urbanisation’ (urbanización), where the rubbish men collected the ‘bazura’ (basura), and every once in a while you were visited by an ‘alcaldy’ (alcalde – mayor), who came from the ‘ayuntamientow’ (ayuntamiento – town hall). If you wanted a drink, the largest concentration of English bars in Benidorm was on the ‘cally londreez’ (Calle Londres). This last one cost me many minutes scanning a map, trying to find something that might resemble the sound uttered by the woman on the other end of the phone, until Jonathan once again took pity on me and pointed me in the right direction.

I went down to Ginés’s bar alone. Juan couldn’t make it that night, and when I saw there was no-one else there from our little group, I resigned myself to a quiet evening. I sat at the bar and ordered a brandy. If nobody arrived by the time I had finished my drink, I would simply head home.

The old men were playing their usual game of dominoes, feet scuffing the sawdust-covered floor as they twitched on their seats. Their voices rose and fell in waves like an unpredictable flock of birds.

I drained the glass and turned to go but was stopped by a tug on my elbow. It was Lola.

‘Well,’ she said. ‘How about a drink?’

I smiled yes and ordered two more brandies. I was glad to see her here away from the school.

‘Would you like to sit at the table?’ I asked.

‘No. Let’s stay here.’ She pulled up a bar stool and sat next to me. ‘I get so bored always doing the same thing.’

We sat close to one another, drinking. There was a hesitant smile on her lips.

‘Teacher couldn’t make it?’ she asked after a pause.

‘No, Juan had to—’

‘Are you learning fast?’ she interrupted.

‘I don’t really know. It’s not easy to say. I think Juan pushes me quite hard.’

‘I thought perhaps . . .’ Her voice tailed off and she seemed to forget what she was going to say. She brushed a thick strand of dark red hair away from her eyes.

‘It looks like the others aren’t coming today,’ I said.

‘Yes. It happens like this sometimes. Although I’m usually the one who doesn’t make it. Pilar doesn’t like that. She thinks I should make more of an effort. But she doesn’t know what it’s like.’

I studied her as she spoke: hair swept back over slightly rounded shoulders, revealing thick gold earrings; her fingers playing with the end of her long, fleshy nose; deep mischievous eyes that flicked around the room, never still. She seemed bored, or melancholy, but at the same time she radiated energy, like a hot coal waiting to burst into flame.

‘Doesn’t know what what’s like?’ I asked.

She sighed, paused, and looked me hard in the eye. ‘She doesn’t know what it’s like being married to an antiflamenquista.’ There was a sense of inevitability in her voice, and I had an impression of crossing a threshold.

‘What’s that?’ I asked.

‘Vicente,’ she said. ‘Your boss, my husband.’ I waited. ‘He hates flamenco. Can’t stand it. Always has.’ She paused. ‘And he hates me having anything to do with it. Says I shouldn’t dance, tries to stop me from coming here to the bar, or going to our little get-togethers in the country. He hates it.’

She buried her face in the glass and her hair fell over her eyes. I wasn’t sure if she was crying.

‘I don’t understand.’

She sniffed and lifted her head. ‘Vicente . . . Vicente likes to see himself as an intellectual. Rejects traditional Spain, folklore, that sort of thing, as barbarous. It’s horrendous. But they all look to France and Britain – especially Britain – as the heart of all that is good. Spain bad, Britain good.’

‘What?’

‘Oh, don’t worry, guiri. He thinks you’re wonderful. Admittedly he is a little confused by your interest in flamenco, but he’s convinced it’s just the passing infatuation of a northern European with his primitive southern cousins. You will see the error of your ways, probably under his guidance. He already has plans for you.’

I only half-registered what she said. Her sudden opening up to me had caught me unawares.

‘But I don’t understand. Why are you and he . . .?’ I hesitated to ask. It seemed so familiar to be discussing such matters.

‘Yes. Good question. I ask myself the same. Of course, I know the answer. But . . .’ She knocked back her brandy and ordered two more.

‘You did want another, didn’t you?’

I nodded. The two glasses were placed down next to us on the metal bar with a clink. Lola lent across me reaching for a tissue, brushing her arm lightly over my chest. She wiped her mouth, then screwed the paper into a tight ball before tossing it to the floor.

‘I’ve been dancing since before I could walk,’ she continued, lighting a cigarette and drawing on it with her full, wide lips. ‘It was all there, from the beginning: my father with his old records, my mother teaching me steps in the kitchen. I was going to be a dancer, a good dancer. Everyone said it was in my blood.’

‘You are a good dancer.’

‘They had it planned for me: go to Madrid, study, dance, turn professional.’ She shrugged.

‘What happened?’

‘I met Vicente.’ She took another mouthful from her glass. ‘Got pregnant when I was seventeen. That’s kind of terminal for a dancing career.’ She laughed weakly. ‘But I could still have done it. I could still have been a dancer, maybe not professional, but, you know, here and there. But he held me back. Said I needed to stay at home. Then the school, and . . . well, that’s it.’ Her head bowed once more. ‘I’ve asked him for a divorce,’ she said quietly, looking down.

I was both embarrassed and thrilled that she should be telling me such intimate details about herself. But this was quickly absorbed by the surprise of seeing the image I had built up of her dissolving in front of me: this strong, fiery woman, who instilled fear in those around her, was helpless and trapped.

‘I have to go.’ She threw her head back and stared at me. ‘I’m a mother, remember?’

We paid and left, out into the pools of light cast by the streetlamps, walking together for the distance that our two paths coincided, silent, our shoulders almost touching. As we reached the corner she turned to face me, stepping away as though to be any closer meant danger.

‘I’m going this way,’ she said. I nodded. Normally when we parted from social encounters, we kissed one another on the cheeks, but this time there was hesitation. She wavered, stepping backwards and forwards, as though undecided.

‘Do you think . . .’ I began.

‘I’ll see you at school tomorrow,’ she said, turning away and heading down the hill. I stood, watching her walk, the gentle rhythm of her hips.

It was late, and very quiet. A Tuesday. One of only two nights off for the town’s revellers. Guidebooks on Spain always cite figures showing there to be more bars per square inch than people, or more cafés in Madrid than in the whole of the rest of the world put together. I forget what the real numbers are, but the impression they give is generally true. You can barely find a street that doesn’t have some sort of watering hole, usually several, and this is reflected in the night life. The party normally starts on a Thursday, because having a hangover on a Friday doesn’t really count. Then of course there are Friday and Saturday nights. This usually drags on until Sunday, because once on a roll, why bother stopping? And Monday hangovers don’t really count for much either. For the really hardcore, even Monday night can swing. Not that the Spanish ever get really drunk in an Anglo-Saxon way, though. Alcohol is merely a means to an end – having fun. And for such a devout and social race, having fun begins to take on almost religious dimensions, where sleep is an act of apostasy and only the hardened all-nighters are guaranteed a place in the Kingdom of Heaven. Tuesday and Wednesday are the real days of the weekend in Spain – the only days when rest for all is a certainty and religious duties are excused.

Walking back home under the palm trees along the empty road, I could hear my footsteps echoing against the buildings on the other side. At my front door, I paused. A woman struggling to carry a mattress had turned the corner and was coming up behind me. I asked her where she was going.

‘My house is just around the corner,’ she said in a strong French accent. ‘Can you ’elp me?’

I picked up one end of the mattress and we set off. Five minutes around the block, I thought, and I’ll be back before midnight.

We headed towards the market, walking in silence, trying to keep a grip on the old mattress as it kept slipping between our fingers. I could feel the dust from it rising up in clouds and tickling my nose. We went past the market, past the bank and down onto the Rambla, the wide road leading to the beach. Hardly around the corner, I thought, but we must be getting close by now.

‘I live just here, in the barrio,’ she said. We walked on into the old quarter. My hands were tiring and the sweat made the surface of my palms even more slippery. It felt like carrying an enormous fish. And who was this strange, slight Frenchwoman? She certainly wasn’t talkative. I felt cheated. Surely my compensation for all this effort was a little conversation.

‘It’s a heavy old mattress you’ve got here,’ I said. She didn’t reply.

We kept walking, through the narrow alleyways, past all the bars, the little cinema, the decrepit square. Where were we going? She said it was close by. I was beginning to regret my act of charity. On we went, up the steep hill into the cluster of white houses at the foot of the castle, deep into areas I had no idea existed. In the moonlight I could see blurred graffiti on crumbling walls, written in a language I didn’t understand. I was sweating from the exertion now, cursing this woman for taking advantage of my willingness to help. Where the bloody hell did she live? Perhaps she didn’t have a house at all and was looking for somewhere to bed down for the night.

Finally we arrived at a line of small houses on the very edge of the old town, to the rear of the castle.

‘It’s ’ere,’ she said. Her house was the final one in the row. We got to her door, put the mattress down and she went inside to turn on the lights.

‘Thank you. I can manage now.’ I stood there. It seemed strange just to turn on my heel and head straight home. I felt I had been through something with this woman, even if I was cursing her most of the way. She noticed my hesitation.

‘Did you want to come in?’ she asked.

‘No. I think . . .’

‘Here, then. Take my card. Come back whenever you like.’ She reached into her pocket and handed me a torn piece of paper. ‘Christine’ it said. ‘Psychic’.

I returned one afternoon the following week, justifying my visit with the thought that she owed me something. Perhaps she could tell my fortune.

She welcomed me matter-of-factly and beckoned me in.

The house was small, white, and decorated with Moroccan rugs, Indian shawls, and sweet-smelling candles. There were symbols hanging from the walls: ankhs, pentacles, peace signs.

After a few moments she emerged with some camomile tea. ‘Here,’ she said. ‘It’s all I ’ave.’

We sat in silence on brightly coloured cushions strewn on the floor. Now that I’d come I wasn’t quite sure what to say.

‘Mattress all right?’ I tried.

‘Hm? Oh, yes. The mattress is fine.’

She was looking at me, or rather staring at me quite intensely. I tried to concentrate on the decorations on the walls, the books on the shelf. Works on healing, magic, mysticism.

‘I can read the cards for you,’ she said suddenly, ‘if you like.’

‘OK. Sure.’ I was relieved something was going to happen. I had been drinking my tea so quickly it had burnt my throat.

She handed me a pack of large cards and I was asked to shuffle.

‘I take it you are heterosexual?’ The word sounded odd in her thick accent.

‘Er, yeah,’ I said, taken slightly aback.

‘You know, it is better to ask these days. You cannot know, you know?’

‘Of course.’

‘I might see your partner and not know whether to say “he” or “she”.’

‘No, “she” is fine. Just fine.’

She laid the cards out on the floor between us and began to concentrate. I looked down. No death card: that was a relief. What did the others mean, though? It looked like a mess.

‘It hits me straight away,’ she said. ‘You have many good attributes, but here,’ she rapped her fist hard against her chest, ‘you have not grown up here. In your emotions.’ She paused, then said, ‘You are emotionally immature.’

Her words rang inside me like a bell and I sat back on the cushions, confused. How could one be emotionally immature? It seemed such a strange idea. Surely one just grew, and developed. It took care of itself, didn’t it? Maybe not. Somewhere, part of me understood just what she meant. Wasn’t that one of the reasons I was here in Spain, after all, this most emotional of countries? Hadn’t it been the warmth, the emotional ease of the Spaniards that had kept me here, had attracted me to flamenco and the country in the first place?

The Frenchwoman continued.

‘You feel as though the universe is pushing you towards having a relationship with a woman, a woman you know. But it is for you to say, for you to decide. It is of no concern to the universe if you do or you do not.’ She now had my undivided attention.

‘You may suffer, it depends on you. But there will be grieving soon. In the next year. But also change. You will not recognise your future self.’

She picked up the cards and put them away. ‘That is all for now. I must ask you to leave.’

I stood up and brushed myself down, still dazed by what she had said. Heading out into the sun from her cave-like home, I was temporarily blinded by the light. I turned to say goodbye, but the door had already closed.