Duende Read online

  About the Book

  When Jason Webster heads off for Spain in search of duende, the intense emotional state – part ecstasy, part desperation – so intrinsic to flamenco, he has no idea what to expect.

  What he finds is a kaleidoscope of experience and excitement: From the tyranny of his guitar teacher, practising for hours on end until his fingers bleed to his passionate affair with Lola, a flamenco dancer (and older woman) married to the gun-toting Vicente, which causes him to flee Alicante in fear of his life. In Madrid, he falls in with Gypsies and meets the imperious Jesús. Joining their dislocated, cocaine-fuelled world, stealing cars by night and sleeping away the days in tawdry rooms, he finds himself spiralling self-destructively downwards. It is only when he arrives in Granada bruised and battered, after two years total immersion in the flamenco lifestyle, that he is able to put his obsession into context.

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Epilogue

  Flamenco Discography

  About the Author

  Copyright

  DUENDE

  A Journey in Search of Flamenco

  Jason Webster

  ‘Duende . . . A mysterious power that everyone feels but that no philosopher has explained.’

  Goethe

  ‘Dismal Spanish wailings punctuated by the rattle of the castanets and the clashing harmonies of the guitar.’

  Aldous Huxley

  ‘The truth marries no-one.’

  Spanish proverb

  For Rafa,

  and the duende moments with him

  that inspired me

  To protect the identities of those

  involved, some of the names of

  people and places have been

  changed.

  prologue

  * * *

  OFTEN WE END up doing what we almost want to do because we lack the courage to do what we really want to do. For years I lived in Italy because I wanted to be in Spain.

  As a teenager, Spain had captivated me. Touristy photo books showed a technicolour land of cathedral-like blue skies, dark, open-faced women with bright red carnations in their hair, and the delicate columns and lines of the Alhambra and the Great Mosque in Córdoba. It seemed ancient, mysterious, exotic; a mythical country of semi-madness where men in tight trousers fought deadly beasts and people spoke in earthy, gutteral sentences that gave great philosophical importance to everyday tasks such as buying the milk. Outside my window, the Fens of East Anglia stretched an eternal grey in every direction; a flat, wet desert of inbred farmers and plump girls on bicycles, where the only possible excitement was trying to persuade Blind Bob, the barman at the Red Lion, to give me a drink despite the fact that I was underage. In the books, Spain and its people were always beautiful and warm and passionate. It felt like a lost home. One day I felt sure I would go and live there.

  But things got in the way: a chance to live in Italy and the beginning of a self-destructive relationship; university to study Arabic; a year living in Egypt eating beans and running away from over-zealous papyrus salesmen. In my ignorance I thought I was being drawn to the Mediterranean in general. I was wrong. I never found the human warmth and openness I sought and expected to find – the Italians were too busy worrying about how they looked, the Egyptians about the next meal. It was, and always had been, Spain.

  Then a chance to remedy things came unexpectedly: after four dry, affectionless years, my Florentine girlfriend left me on the day of my last exam. Bound by the addictive ideas of first love, the plan had been for me to go and join her in Italy once my degree was over: after a relationship built on phone calls and holidays, we could finally be together. But after so much time spent dreaming of an end to our separation, the opportunity to make it real proved too much, and the self-destructive streak in her took control just as my time at university came to an end. No more girl, no more Italy, no more university, no more Middle East.

  Suitably heartbroken, I realised that my chance to make a break for Spain had finally come. Loveless and eager for adventure, I was free to escape the mistakes I’d made and explore the passionate world that had inspired me as a teenager; a world I felt I should have been experiencing all along. Spain, I felt, was calling me. But I was keen not just to float around. I wanted something to do there.

  ‘All that university stuff’s self-indulgent crap!’ a drunken busker assured me in a pub one evening after offering to rearrange my nose.

  ‘I mean, what the fuck are you gonna do with your degree if you’re ever up shit creek? You can’t eat a degree. At least I can play “Streets of London” and earn a few quid that way.’

  He hit a nerve. After four years’ study, all I could offer were five different words for ‘camel’ and the classical Arabic term for masturbation. I desperately wanted a skill, to be able to do something with my hands after years of sitting in libraries concocting meaningless arguments to impress my tutors with. But bricklaying and plastering had only limited appeal. I wanted something more creative.

  The busker took pity on me and asked me to buy him a drink.

  ‘Tell you what,’ he said as I handed over a large brandy and soda, ‘you should take up the guitar, learn a few chords, like me.’

  I had never been particularly musical, although the guitar had always appealed to me. But at the age of nine, inspired by a man in a pork-pie hat in a ska band on the television, I temporarily forgot my deep-felt ambition and took up the saxophone instead. It was a mistake from the start: the instrument was bigger than I was, then my teacher had a nervous breakdown and fled to a hippy commune in Scotland. Finally my saxophone was stolen by the school thief. I gave up music after that.

  Playing an instrument, however, was precisely the kind of skill I wanted to learn now. I realised all the wrong choices I had made could be cancelled out at once. I was free to live in Spain and to pick up the instrument I had always intended to. All at once it became clear: I should learn flamenco guitar, the musical heart and essence of Spain. It was colourful, exciting and wild – everything my life wasn’t. The decision itself was deceptively simple. With almost no idea about flamenco, or where it might lead me, I decided to start straight away.

  It was a frightening thing to do, though – leaving everything, a structured life, the network of friends and comforts of an environment I knew well. University life was easy and sheltering. That was precisely why so many of those apparently wise and wrinkled old dons wandering around the quads seemed so childish once you got talking to them; bickering and flirting just like the post-adolescents they were teaching. At university you could live all the adventures you wanted in your head just by going to the library and reading about exotic places, while still enjoying cycling around town with a flowing scarf and snuggling by a fire with a pint in a warm pub in wintertime. I began to have doubts.

  ‘You should think about staying on to do some research,’ my tutor said when I saw him in the street. ‘Whatever you do, don’t just take off somewhere. Have you thought about a life in academia? I can just see you as a lecturer.’

  I bought a ticket and a guitar and caught a plane the next day.

  A journey and a quest lasting several years lay ahead of me, an experience that would change me for good. There was far more to flamenco – and to Spain – than I could ever have imagined.r />
  chapter ONE

  * * *

  Por Fandangos

  Yo como tú no encuentro ninguna,

  mujer, con quien compararte;

  sólo he visto, por fortuna,

  a una en un estandarte

  y a los pies lleva la luna.

  I’ve found nobody

  to compare to you, woman;

  only one other seen, fortunately,

  on a church banner

  with the moon at her feet.

  A LARGE WOMAN stands up at the back of the stage and approaches the audience as the guitars play on. Raising an arm above her head, she stamps her foot hard, sweeps her hand down sharply to the side and stares at us in defiance. The music stops and everyone falls silent.

  Power emanates from her across the square. Breathing hard, legs rooted to the ground, chin raised, eyes bright, her face a vivid expression of pain. Everyone in the audience focuses on her as she stands motionless, leaning forward slightly, head thrust back, black hair falling loosely over her dark yellow dress. Stretching her arms down at her sides, she tenses her hands open, as though receiving or absorbing some invisible energy. For a moment I think she might never move, need never move even, so strong is the spell she has cast over us. Then, slowly, she lowers her head till it rests on her chest.

  A sound begins from somewhere, low and deep: a human voice resonating with complex harmonies locked into a single note. I assume it is coming from the stage, but the song – if song it is – seems to be unprojected, effortlessly filling the space around us like water. It shocks me, as if some long-dormant, primitive, and troubled part of myself is being forced into wakefulness against its will. I have never felt anything like this before and struggle to comprehend as previously unfelt or forgotten emotions begin flowing through me, released by the trigger of the music. My eyes fixed ahead, I watch as the woman lifts her face once more, her mouth partly open, and I realise that the sound is coming from her.

  She is singing. But there is no sweet voice, no pleasant melody, no recognisable tune at all. It is more like a scream, a cry, or a shout. Behind her the guitarists begin playing with short, rapid beats, fingers rippling over the strings in strange Moorish-sounding chords. The woman’s voice lilts like a muezzin’s call to prayer.

  I am held by the music, as though any separation between myself and the rhythm has disappeared. A fat woman singing on stage, dancing in a way that seems as if she is barely moving, yet I feel she is stepping inside something and drawing me in with her. A chill, like a ripping sensation, moves up to my eyes. Tears begin to well up, while the cry from her lungs finds an echo within me, and makes me want to shout along with her. The hairs on my skin stand on end, blood drains to my feet. I am rooted to the spot, suspended between the emotion being drawn out of me, as though bypassing my mind, and the shame of what I am feeling.

  The song continues and I become aware that others in the audience are experiencing the same. I can tell by the expressions on their faces, a certain look in their eyes, and simply feeling it sweep around us all in a second, like a trance. Then the cries begin as she finds the echo inside us: shouts of ‘Ole’, ‘Arsa’, ‘Eso es’. Some whisper under their breath, others shout, thick veins pulsating in their necks. The woman fills us, and the evening around us, with a sense of another space.

  The song ends, and the audience breaks out into spontaneous, ecstatic applause. It is an emotional release, the greatest one might ever imagine. Pedro leans over to me.

  ‘Did you feel it?’ he asks.

  The plane flew in over the dust-yellow land. Mountains like pieces of rock half-buried in the sand pushed their way up from the earth, casting long shadows over the landscape as the sun descended behind us. I stared down through the window at the empty space below: arid semi-desert banked by an azure sea, with a promise of balmy, jasmine-scented nights.

  Pedro was my only contact in Spain and therefore, I reasoned, a natural starting point for my journey. A friend of a friend and a university lecturer in Arabic, he greeted me at the airport like a lost son, embracing me warmly in the arrivals hall, and quickly gave me a new name: Mi querido Watson. He said my surname reminded him of the old Sherlock Holmes films and the time he’d spent living on Baker Street as a youth. I couldn’t see the similarity myself.

  ‘Don’t worry. Be khappy,’ he laughed.

  He took me to his house just to the north of Alicante. His father had built it in the Fifties: a white rectangular villa with bright green shutters, verandas and balconies. I was given the top floor and told I could stay as long as I needed. From the roof you could see the sea stretching across to Algeria. Africa seemed very close.

  The garden was straight out of A Thousand and One Nights. Date palms stood next to pungent rosemary bushes in an oasis filled with fig trees, jasmine, delicate red and pink roses, pomegranate trees, and row upon row of lemon and orange trees. The jasmine had been trained over the years to create a covered sanctuary where we could sit away from the intense midday sun, half-intoxicated by the perfume circling around us. Pedro insisted we sit together, talking and drinking tea from bone china cups. At first I was happy to acclimatise in this leisurely fashion. After a few days, though, it was frustrating. I wanted to get going, to begin my flamenco adventure, but my host was a man who liked to take his time over any task at hand, always deliberate and careful in everything he did.

  ‘You can’t run away from your own feet,’ he said, determined to hold me down there in his garden, to stop me from rushing around before I knew where to look.

  He would talk non-stop, one story flowing into another in a constant stream of tales and anecdotes. I could hardly get a word in, and when he let me, it was only to fill in some detail, the name of a town, or a person we both knew. At first our conversation centred on Arabic, which we had both studied, but it soon moved on to other subjects. He talked of his love of England, the folklore of Alicante, astronomy, and recipes for chicken broth. He told me everything I would ever want to know about the ancient Roman settlement over the road, and how one of his cousins had been a Fascist and the other a Republican, but they never let politics interfere in family life. He spoke of the haunting beauty of the ancient statue of a woman’s head that had been found in the nearby town of Elche.

  ‘No-one knows who made her! The Greeks? The Phoenicians? The Iberians? It’s a mystery.’

  And of course, he talked about Arabic poetry, quoting verses of Ibn Hazm, Al-Russafi and Abu al-Hashash al-Munsafi. Dark would fall, the scent of the jasmine giving way to the galán de noche, the gentleman of the night, offering up its stronger more energetic scent, and we would still be there, tales of the Alhambra hanging in the night air.

  ‘You will go there one day,’ Pedro said, swapping in and out between English and Spanish as my ear grew used to his voice. ‘You will see Granada, and it will change you for ever.’ And he pursed his moustachioed lips momentarily before downing his camomile tea.

  ‘Don’t worry. Be khappy.’

  The exact origins of flamenco are uncertain. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are often cited as the period when it started to take shape, but the Roman poet Juvenal referred to Cádiz girls in Rome – puellae gaditanae – who performed dances with bronze castanets in the time of the emperor Trajan. For the poet and flamencologist Domingo Manfredi, writing in the 1960s, this was evidence enough to date flamenco back to classical times. Others have suggested a multiple origin, pointing to the rich mixture of cultures – Iberian, Phoenician, Visigothic, Greek, Roman, Arabic – that have flourished in Spain over the centuries. The composer Manuel de Falla specified the Moorish invasion in 711, the Spanish Church’s adoption of the Byzantine liturgical chant, and the arrival of the Gypsies, bringing with them enharmonic influences from Indian songs, as the key factors in the development of flamenco.

  The role of the Gypsies is crucial but perhaps the least understood. First, there is the question of when they actually arrived in Spain. There appear to have been at least t
wo waves: one from North Africa during the Islamic period, and another from France in the years shortly before the fall of Granada in 1492. No-one doubts that they have played a major role in the development of flamenco; the question is, to what extent? Are they its sole creators? If so, why aren’t there more obvious echoes in Gypsy music from other countries? Did they just take already existing folk-songs and transform them by playing them with their own interpretation and style? Some have tried to divide palos – the different styles and songs within flamenco – into those of supposedly Gypsy and non-Gypsy origin. But then others place some palos outside flamenco altogether. Sevillanas, the essence for most foreigners of ‘typical Spanish’ flamenco, with clacking castanets and dancers in long frilly dresses, would be classified by many aficionados as ‘folklore’, not as flamenco.

  For most flamencos, though, these things are intuited, if thought about at all. Moorish or Jewish, Gypsy or Andalusian, there is an instinctive feel for flamenco, making it easy to recognise, if difficult to pin down. Part of it is to do with being away from the mainstream, or on the outside. For the past two hundred years at least, flamenco has been the music and dance of outcasts, people on the margins of Spanish, and particularly Andalusian, society. From which, perhaps, stems the natural affinity with Gypsies, and accounts for the large number of songs about injustice or going to jail:

  A las rejas de la cárcel

  no me vengas a llorá.

  Ya que no me quitas pena,

  no me la vengas a dá.

  Don’t come crying

  to the prison bars.

  Since you can’t ease my pain,

  don’t come here making it worse.

  The only certainty about flamenco is that it began in Andalusia and remains to this day Andalusian, despite spreading across Spain and around the world. Madrid, and to a lesser extent Barcelona, have recently become flamenco centres, but only by importing southern communities and culture. Andalusia, with its poverty, arid heat and proximity to Africa, remains the eternal reference point and true source.