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I. Montefrio, Last Stop
People often ask how I wound up living in a village in which I'm the only foreigner among some 8,000 Andalucians, and consequently far removed from the sophisticated international atmosphere of Marbella, Almuñecar and Mojácar. I answer that whenever I get bored (which is only now and then) I drive down to Granada, where I mingle with Frenchmen, Dutchmen, Muslims, Buddhists, tourists and artists, and even with other Englishmen in cultural exile such as myself. I have lunch in a Moroccan restaurant in the Albaicin, I admire the beautiful women for whom Granada is famous and then I go back happily to my olive trees, to my view of Parapanda Mountain and to the goatherd's daily visits (when he drives his goats out from the village and when he drives them back).
The dirt track which leads to my cortijo, when wet, resembles a film about the Vietnam war, but I have a Russian jeep which can drive its way up just about anything but the olive trees themselves, as well as, thanks to a stroke of good luck, two phone lines (for voice calls and fax). I recently hooked up to the Internet too, so I'm not as isolated from the "world" as one might imagine.
But when I first came to the village, 35 years ago in 1960, things were very different. The Montefrio of those days was similar to a present-day North African village - women in black, almost total public absence of girls of marrying age, thin boys with short pants and big eyes, mules, flocks of goats, dust, one or two cars and a decrepit bus which came and went to Granada, as the only sign that anything else existed outside of the village.
When a nice-looking girl went for the evening paseo, which was her only chance to be seen by marriage candidates, her mother walked behind her to get a full view of any surreptitious gestures which might be exchanged. And once she landed a novio, I was assured by my landlady, it was just as bad. At the cinema, her mother would sit in the row behind the sweethearts holding a lighted candle near the gap between their seats to make sure they weren't getting too close.
There wasn't even television, unimaginable as this seems today. When a teacher friend of mine recently mentioned the fact to his media-conscious pupils with their psychedelic T-shirts and astronaut-sized track shoes, one asked him in amazement, "How could you live?".
But they did have flamenco, and that was what brought me here. A few days after I arrived in Madrid from New York, at the beginning of the summer, I heard a conference about cante hondo at the students' residence where I was boarding; I later asked the young speaker where I could hear flamenco in its natural setting rather than in a cabaret or concert hall. He told me about a great but little-known singer who was the butcher of his village in Andalucia and I decided to pay him a visit that August.
In the long run, Montefrio turned out to be by far the most crucial event of that summer for me, but when I was living it all, my discovery of the village represented only one fascinating revelation among half a dozen others. I was 18, poetic-looking, and I nurtured, let us say, a rather high opinion of myself by comparison with the rest of humanity - an appraisal, which, thus far, has only been partially borne out, and I'm already 53. C'était la jeunesse!
For me, the summer of 1960 didn't begin in Montefrio but in Pamplona, with the memory of The Sun Also Rises still palpitating in my mind. Three of us went there from Madrid on a tiny motor scooter with sidecar: myself, a Swede and a student from La Mancha, who was the owner of the vehicle. We unrolled our sleeping bags in a grove of trees on the bank of a river near the town, we filled our leather wine-skins with red wine (at 6 pesetas per liter) in the bodegas and went dancing through the streets, each with a red kerchief tied around his throat.
We fell in with a Parisian hitchhiker who looked like Gérard Philippe and who engaged a bull in some serious capework in the midst of the stampede, using his windbreaker. When they let him out of jail, after the festival was over, I joined my new and fascinating friend, who like me was in love with literature and travel, and we set out together on the road of the summer bullfight festivals, the ferias taurinas.
Since Yves was travelling with a very small amount of money, we hitchhiked, although in real terms it was not that much cheaper than taking the train. Auto-stop, as the French dubbed it, was very fashionable then among young people of our ilk. You felt proud of every kilometer you travelled at someone else's expense, and it was almost a point of honour not to give up and take the train. In those years there was still very little traffic on Spain's highways, and I frequently felt like giving up and paying, but my friend, who had even hitch-hiked through Yugoslavia, had his principles and would not allow it.
The same applied to food. With ridiculously cheap tavern food everywhere, we had to live on tins of sardines with bread and tomatoes, because Yves felt that eating in restaurants was only for the bourgeois. But in spite of the somewhat austere conditions imposed by my friend, it was a thrilling trip.
In fact, I had already done some hitchhiking of my own that summer. At the end of the fiesta, Javier decided that his scooter wouldn't make it back to Madrid with such a heavy load, and the Swede and I drew straws to see which man would have to hit the road on his own. I was especially annoyed to lose because I had been sold a pair of prettily coloured birds by a street peddler and, never having hitch-hiked before, wondered if anyone would take a man with a cage in his hand. The Swede promised to cover the price of the train ticket if I was forced to pay to get to Madrid, and they left me on the outskirts of Pamplona.
Tired of waiting in the shade of a tree without seeing more than a few cars, I began to walk. By noon I was in a wretched hamlet where a faded sign over a curtain-hung door said BAR, and I staggered in out of the sunlight, bird cage in hand. I can still remember how delicious the slices of tomato soaked in olive oil were, which the stunned woman in the black dress put before me, with a big chunk of bread to mop it up.
At the end of the dusty day a tractor took me as far as the next station town where I got on board a train to Zaragoza, sitting on a bare wooden bench among field workers dressed in corduroys and caps, who kindly shared with me their dinner of potato omelette and red wine. Much later I realized that Spaniards always invite you when they eat in public, out of politeness, motioning towards their lunch pail and grunting "¿Sí gusta?", to which one is supposed to reply "¡Que aproveche!" to wish them a nice meal, but not to actually partake of it.
But my poverty-worn peasants were soon rewarded for their unintentional sacrifice. A radio was broadcasting a speech by a spokesman of the Franco regime, which went on and on bombastically, and seeing the long-suffering expressions around me I could not repress an ironic comment, saying "Habla habla habla y no dice nada - He talks, talks, talks and says nothing".
The weary-looking owner of the lunch pail flashed me a sympathetic glance, but there was a man in a suit on the other side of the aisle who, unlike the labourers, was obviously a member of the winning side in the war. He threateningly called me to order and said I should respect the government of the country I was visiting. All the eyes, in their leathery faces, sunk to the floor, and I suddenly felt very alone.
In Zaragoza I got a night train to Madrid, with more wooden benches, and was so tired when I reached my room on the Calle de los Madrazo that I slept solidly for 12 hours. When I awoke I found, for the first time since I was a little boy, that I had wetted the bed! That night at the Residencia I showed the Swede my train ticket and he promised to send me the money when he got back to Uppsala University, which, to his credit, he did. But after the maid put a bowl of water in the cage so the birds could bathe, I was dismayed to find that they were only greyish brown swallows _ the man who sold them to me had dyed them and the colours came out in the first wash.
A few days later, my new hero, Yves, knocked on the door of my flat, having just been released from jail with the others who had broken the law against fighting the bulls and bringing with him some spectacular photos of himself doing it, which he had found posted on the front of a shop on the Calle Estafeta. A few days later, we were on our way to the next feria of the season, in Valencia.
Yves had been in Spain several times before so we spoke Spanish together, since I still only had basic knowledge of French. To while away the many hours we had to spend waiting for rides, we sang the music we knew to one another, and when we had exhausted our repertory of blues, fandangos and Spanish Civil War songs, he introduced me to the ballads of George Brassens, then at the height of his popularity in France. He wrote down the lyrics of Le Petit Cheval Blanc and Au Bois de Mon Coeur on a notebook propped on his backpack, and I sang along imitating the sounds, although many of the words and expressions were strange to me.
In Valencia, we followed the rise of the prodigy of Pamplona, the boyish Paco Camino, and we even saw him rise in the real sense of the word as well. It was one of the truly unforgettable moments of my bullfighting years. Camino was "dedicating" his bull to the sunny (and cheap) side of the plaza (where, of course, we were sitting with our wine-skins) when the bull, which had been standing as still as a statue at the other side of the ring, suddenly began to run towards him, like a noiseless locomotive. Camino did not realize that the public's frantic screams were meant to warn him of the impending disaster, and he went on smiling and waving his hat in our direction, until the bull's broad horns neatly surrounded his waist. Aghast, we saw him twirl up in the air just like a rag doll, with the smile still on his lips. Camino was even elegant when the bull threw him, and a few weeks later he had recovered from his bruises and was killing again, elegantly.
Each day after the fight we took the tramway to a beach near the city. A fisherman and his son cooked for us on a fire in a hole in the sand, and when night fell we unrolled our sleeping bags close down to the water, where, after a first night of torture higher up on the sand, we discovered that the mosquitoes wouldn't bother us.
We were half-asleep one night when I noticed two strange silhouettes approaching us, with square black hats shining in the moonlight and gun barrels sticking up beside them. It was a pareja of Civil Guardsmen who examined our passports with their flashlights before moving on. Spain was still very wary of being invaded by foreigners with their godless habits, and there were signs on the beach warning women against wearing trajes de baño de dos piezas, two-pieced bathing suits. No one could have foreseen the day when the rule would be followed to the letter by simply forgetting one of the pieces!
It took us three days to get from Valencia to Malaga, since not many drivers were willing to take two giants with knapsacks aboard their tiny SEAT 600's. We passed the promontory of Peñón de Ifach, dwarfing its coastline of poor, whitewashed houses, and the fishing village of Benidorm, which, with its terra cotta church, resembled some Greek island washed up on the shore of the shining sea. By the evening of the first day we were in Huercal Overa, where the sidewalks were so clean that we unrolled our sleeping bags to spend the night on one, until a friendlier pair of Civil Guardsmen invited us to sleep in the jail, which was just as clean and empty as the sidewalk.
By the afternoon of the second day we were in the sugar cane fields of Salobreña. The village on its hump of rock glistened in the sun like a citadel of the Arabian Nights. After waiting for several frustrating hours, we decided to give up and continue the next day, but what we discovered was one of the best parts of our journey.
There was no one there except a few villagers, and the streets seemed to have been carved out of snow, radiant with sea-blue light. Our enchantment was such that we had to touch the whitewashed walls and steps and fountains to be sure they were not the stuff of a mirage.
At the top of the hill stood the crumbling Moorish castle, squat and solid like a great lump of brown sugar half-melted by the sun. The owner of the only pensión told us that Cervantes had slept there, but what impressed us most was the old woman in black who sat all day in the crudely paved patio, without moving or speaking. But when she saw us cross the courtyard and head to our room, with our tins of sardines, tomatoes and bread, thus avoiding the gloomy (and for Yves, bourgeois) dining room, she raised her black-hooded head and gave out a piercing, wailing cry. It was directed at no one in particular except, perhaps, at God, to tell him that the barbarians ate bread and sardines just like any cristiano: "Van a co-MER. ¡VAN A CO-MER!" (They're going to eat!).
In those days, bullfighting was highly fashionable among artists and intellectuals, largely due to the writings of Hemingway and the paintings of Picasso, and Torremolinos was the chic place to stay for the happy few. All the jet-setting aficionados gathered there, but without Hemingway, given that his last summer in Spain was the previous one, which he called in an article about bullfighting for Life magazine "The Dangerous Summer". But, strangely, there was someone whom the Spaniards called el falso Hemingway, an eccentric American millionaire who resembled him, when seen from a distance, which was enough - in the absence of the real thing - for all the newspapers to write about him incessantly.
We got friendly with him, partly out of curiosity and partly to get invited for wine and tapas, and learned that, as well as bullfighting, he had a peculiar hobby: he travelled around the capitals of the world looking for strange names. For example, he had discovered, in the Civil Registry of Caracas, that someone had christened his child with the name of… Jesus Lenin! Inevitably, there was also the rich American girl who followed the bullfighters rather than the bullfights themselves. Ours was called Virginia and she drove from one feria to the other in an expensive car stalking her prey.
I have to admit that the Hemingway look-alike left me as cold as a dish of leftover paella, that the torero-crazy Virginia struck me as being spoiled and vulgar, and that even Orson Welles - whom I later recognised for the genius which he was - only caught my attention because, the day his massive bulk lumbered up to the table we were sharing with "Hemingway" at a sidewalk café in Valencia, Yves gazed at him as if he were a living legend. Sadly, Welles was always more admired in Europe than in his native land, and I was coming from North America. I was not to discover Citizen Kane and The Lady From Shanghai until a year later, in the cinemas of the Latin Quarter.
No - the great celebrity of the summer for me was a Frenchman, with whom I was well familiar thanks to my artistic mother: the poet, painter and (most of all) personality Jean Cocteau, only three years before his death. He was staying in Torremolinos where, a few days after our meeting, he was caught behind a boat on the sand doing "something" with a fisherman, as a result of which he spent a few days in jail, until the French authorities could come to the rescue of their grand homme. We saw him in the vast lobby of the Hotel Miramar, where the bullfighters stayed, impeccably elegant in his dark blue suit, his shirt and tie as perfect and natural as if he had been born in them, and his impish, bird-like face framed by a crown of frizzy grey hair.
Unfortunately I couldn't follow the lively conversation which ensued, and had to make do with the running translation which Yves gave me in his broken Spanish. When Cocteau heard that we were sleeping in the ruins of the Moorish castle, he vehemently declared that he hated hotels and wished he could spend the night up on El Gibralfaro with us, à la belle étoile. A group photo was taken, with Cocteau flanked on one side by Yves and the other by me. Around us was the false Hemingway, the prissy Virginia looking a bit like Elizabeth Taylor, plus a very serious American bullfighter whose name I have forgotten but who in his old age, I believe, became a painter of bullfighting scenes.
When the photographer fired his flash bulb, Cocteau sprang up into the air and cried joyously, "Jack in the box!". I asked him to dedicate a few lines to my mother on the hotel stationery to send for her birthday the next month, and he sketched one of his famous faun's heads, wreathed with his whimsical hand-writing, which was an artwork in itself.
There was an interval of a week or so before the feria of Bilbao, with the whole of Spain in the middle. The magic combination of elements, like Lorca's "living coin", would never occur again: extreme youth, thirst for adventure and enough time and money to wander at will, in a country which in many ways was still the vieja España of Goya, where you still had the feeling that you were discovering things for the first time - and sometimes actually were! Travelling through Spain, in those days, was not only a trip in the geographical sense, but a journey into the past.
Sadly, I remember nothing of my first visit to the Alhambra, for the simple reason that I have visited it so often since then. From Granada, we went to the village recommended by my friend Pepe Avila. Due to the almost total absence of traffic off the main roads, we were forced to take the train to El Tocón on the plain, at the foot of the montes or hills, where a bus was waiting which carried us, along with a small group of wrinkled men dressed in grey and wrinkled women dressed, almost all of them, in black, up to the village. Montefrio was the last stop for the few buses that came here, and it still is. The locals, long resigned to their geographical isolation, often joke that no one goes through here to get to anywhere else _ "de aquí no se va a ninguna parte".
When you approach Montefrio from El Tocón you get the most surprising view of all. The village is sunk in a valley, but the church and ruined castle are perched high up on a great spur of rock, so the first thing one sees as the bus descends is a lonely belltower. A few dizzying curves later and the entire church emerges triumphantly from below, like a tawny man-of-war sailing over an undulating sea of olive groves. Little by little, at the foot of the spur, the tiled houses of the village come into view, dazzling whitely in the cleft between two ochre hills...
An old man had been sent to fetch us where the bus stopped in front of the great round church. I thought that, with his beret, waistcoat, cheery toothless smile and cigarette butt stuck to his lip, he resembled a character in one of the greatest classics of Spanish cinema, "Bienvenido Mister Marshall". Crowds of women and children gathered in front of us in the street to stare, since they had never seen a foreigner before, so that Tio Paco had to open a path among them for us to pass.
He took us straight to the local Casino, a "gentlemen's" club where the flamencos - the fabulous butcher Manuel Avila, the baker Cristobal Moya, who delivered his bread to the farms with a mule, the two gypsy brothers Melchor and José and the barber, Rafael, who played the guitar - were waiting around a table laden with glasses of white wine (only women drank beer in Spain then). For tapas, as well as the usual fried anchovies and squid, there appeared at different moments a bowl of pipirranas, which is a juicy tomato salad, and mollejas, chunks of sheep guts fried in oil and garlic. Two, three or four hours later _ it seemed like four but might have been two - we were taken, half drunk from the wine and half from the music, to Pepe's house, which he had instructed to be made ready for us. There, we slept out our siesta to the noisy gyrating of the electric fan which someone had thoughtfully put between our beds.
