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II. The House at the Corner of Jesus

 

        My official reason for coming to Spain, when I asked Dad to finance the journey, was that I wanted to study "Hispanic culture", which I naively thought of as flamenco singing and the poetry of Lorca and Saint John of the Cross. But I soon realized that these subjects had never existed in the curriculum of the Facultad de Filosofia y Letras. Flamenco, in those patrician days, was looked down on as uncouth music for gypsies, nighthawks and left-wing intellectuals, which shocked me then, although I am now inclined to believe that it was better that way. Lorca, being associated with the other political gang, the "reds", was never mentioned in public, and his books, all printed in Argentina, were only sold under the counter. And the erotico-mistico San Juan was clearly out of line with the lofty, moralistic image of Christianity upheld by Franco's regime.

        For me, after New York in the "beatnik" years, the atmosphere of the university was stifling, almost medieval. My classmates were nuns, priests and - for the large part - well-off Spanish señoritas who were preparing to be schoolteachers, one of whom, I confess, I almost immediately fell in love with. We only studied the thinkers whose ideas were approved by the Opus Dei, a powerful Catholic organization to which most of the professors belonged. I thought that they were frightening people, with highly intellectual, beautifully constructed arguments to support every one of their religious beliefs. This explains why I spent much more time in the bars around the Plaza Mayor carousing with my friends from the student hostel and trying to get together privately with my young madrileña, than bothering about school.

        One specific impediment to academic success was the great trouble I had with the Latin, both because the Spanish students were already well advanced in this subject from their secondary studies and, also, because being a dead tongue it had no appeal for me whatsoever. A sympathetic young priest in the class offered to coach me at home in his dimly-lit flat, and we spent long hours (or at least, they seemed long to me) reading the Wars of Gaul.

        It was very cold and we crouched around the mesa de camilla, a round table with a brazier of mouldering embers underneath. The idea was to roast the lower parts of our bodies and try to warm the upper ones, the parts that couldn't be covered with the heavy manta or tablecloth, by swallowing the thimblefuls of brandy served by his old mother. But the Latin was so boring that Joaquin's kind help would probably not have been enough to save me from being flunked, even if I had stayed on to take the end-of-year exams.

        After that disheartening autumn, I spent the Christmas holidays in heaven with my companion of the summer's bullfighting adventures, in a picturesque garret "under the roof", as they say, of a sombre old building north of the Place de la République. It was my first visit to France and by time I said farewell to Yves' working class family, well-stuffed with oysters, foie gras and steak frites, I realized that my life, to paraphrase Josephine Baker, would be divided between two loves, Spain and Paris.

        Back in my apartment near the Paseo del Prado (for I soon moved out of the uncomfortable student residence) I began to realize the mistake I had made. Madrid was really just another hard, grey city, which somehow refused to render up its soul, if it had one. The mysterious Pilar, although lovelier to behold and better groomed than my Greenwich Village girlfriends, was also much less adventurous. And as for my studies, it was pretty clear that all they were being good for was to keep my monthly allowance of 75 Canadian dollars rolling in.

        This amount was then enough for me to live like a señorito, ordering tailor-made suits, taking taxis everywhere and standing my friends from the Residencia to drinks when they were out of pocket, which was most of the time. May my dear Dad forgive me, but I had decided that I could learn much more about Hispanic culture in the street than at school. As for the sacrosanct degrees and diplomas, it was possible, in those faraway years when there were less young people than jobs, to feel that I was smart enough to get along in life without them. And in this at least, time has proven me right!

        Therefore, with nary a thought for the academic consequences of my rash act, I transferred to the University of Granada at the beginning of the spring, in the middle of the first year of the Romance Languages course. That way I would be closer to Montefrio, the fascinating village I had discovered the previous summer, closer to flamenco, and closer to the spirit of my beloved poet Lorca.

        Behind the splendour of its Moorish castle, Granada was only a sleepy provincial town, extremely conservative, and the Faculty of Letters, then housed in a seedy old palace, was even worse than what I had left in Madrid. The fact that I was the only foreign student was sensational enough for the daily newspaper to interview and photograph me in my Byronesque black corduroy suit.

        I was asked about my interest in Montefrio, to the great satisfaction of the few villagers who read the paper, and also about my love of flamenco, which I rather eloquently defined as "man crying out in his solitude", el grito del hombre en la soledad. The reporter from Patria also mentioned that I had a "mane of hair like a torrent of gold", and a picture was printed of me as if to prove it. Although only moderately long by today's standards, back then it was enough to create a commotion wherever I went, even in New York.

        I chose to study Classical Arabic rather than Latin as the lesser of two evils, but all I can remember of that ancient, but living language is that qatala, qatalti and qataltu are conjugations of the verb "to kill". In fact, the only thing I did successfully was to copy the teacher's arabesques with great elegance, for which I was much praised, even though I had only the vaguest idea of what I was writing.

        As I would have foreseen if I had then known myself as well as I do now, my assault on the Spanish University did not survive the spring, and I was soon chasing another, more attainable, rainbow. At the beginning of the Holy Week celebrations, in a tavern where she was surrounded by old men offering her wine, I met a tomboyish German girl whom I immediately recognized as a kindred spirit.

        This fearless hitchhiker and dropout from the Munich art school was christened Leiselotte but insisted on being called only Lilo (pronounced LEE-lo), because, she said, her real name was too feminine. That same night I took her up to El Albaicin to see the sun rise over the Alhambra, and, a few days later, to Montefrio to hear my flamenco friends singing saetas, the heart-rending chants for the Easter passion. I realized that Manolo was the most spiritual butcher in the history of music when he stepped out on the balcony of El Casino, with his grey jacket and white shirt buttoned to the throat, to solemnly salute the crucified Christ - whom he in many ways resembled, and not only when he was singing.

        Lilo agreed with me that both Montefrio and Manolo were unique, and after endless conversations and bottles of wine, shared on a mattress spread on the floor of the tiny house I was renting behind the Church of San Antón, we decided to spend the summer in the village. After that we would go together to study in Paris, I at the Sorbonne and she in the atelier of a painter I knew of, because my mother had studied with him several years before.

        That was how we lived then, making it up as we went along! I had had a taste of France and wanted more, and as for Spain, it would, for many years hence, be that archaic and romantic country to which I would travel as a pilgrim whenever I could.

        We hitchhiked to Paris to make arrangements for our studies in the autumn and returned to Montefrio, where we found a house to stay in until September. It was as graceful and tall as a tower of El Generalife, the Sultan's retreat in the Alhambra, and had a similar mirador on top, with three whitewashed Moorish arches in each side. Embedded in the corner of the massive house, behind an iron grill, was a framed engraving of the Cristo de Moclín, for which they called the place "The Corner of Jesus".

        We had to go to Cordoba to settle the deal with the owner, who ran a boarding house for construction workers. There, across a round white plastic table cover and under a naked light bulb, we agreed to pay a monthly rental of 650 pesetas, which was about $11 and seemed to us ridiculously cheap, although the neighbours later told us we could have got it for half the price. Our fierce-looking landlady handed us an amazingly large iron key, as if we were crusaders setting out to liberate the Temple of Jerusalem. The only condition was that we could not use the parlour and bedroom on the ground floor, where she kept her belongings, and where she stayed a week in August to take part in the village fiesta.

        We spent most of our time high up in the tower painting and writing, so we didn't mind having her there, and even enjoyed the few days of her visit. She was a stout peasant woman with a faint moustache who dressed, of course, in black, and had a very small one-armed husband. She told us that when the other women teased her for having such a physically reduced husband, she would put them in their places by retorting, "Maybe, but he has a `cigar' like this!", raising her forearm and gripping it at the elbow. She made a point of telling us that there were some malas mujeres in the town who were much visited by the other husbands, but that hers had enough to keep him busy at home.

        The villagers gave her a curious nickname: La Barranquilla. This was the result of a humorous association between the title of a Colombian ditty one often heard on the radio about an alligator who makes a trip to the seaport of that name, and the fact that, before she moved to Cordoba, she had owned a bar (hence: bar-ranquilla), a tiny tasca facing the church door, on the corner of the Calle de Alcalá. But her real name was Antonia, although, as usual, no one used it except when addressing her personally. In Andalucia, where everyone is named after one of a handful of popular saints, the pseudonym or apodo is the only way of effectively identifying one Antonio and Antonia, and Paco and Paquita, from the other.

        But it took us a while to realize this. We would meet a nice man and ask him his name, and he would give us the one he was officially christened with, el nombre de pila, or "font name". When, later, we wanted to tell some friend of ours about our encounter, and said that we had met a man called Francisco Jimenez or Manuel Sanchez, we got mystified looks - until we explained that he was a carpenter or a muledriver and had a moustache or a bad leg. Then, and only then, we were told the invariably colourful nickname by which he was known to everyone except, possibly, his mother.

        Lilo and I were a great novelty and friends came and went all day long to see us, but the one I especially associate with the house itself was a blacksmith known as Pepe Sena. He worked with his father in a forge on the Calle Baja which reminded me of Vulcan´s furnace, where I would often go to hear Pepe talk in his lisping granadino drawl as he plucked the glowing horseshoes and farm tools out of the embers and hammered them into shape.

        Montefrio has always had at least one specimen in residence of the type I call "philosophers", men who in spite of their rough trades and rural upbringing have done some reading and take a keen interest in the world outside, even though, in those years before television, they gave the impression of looking at it through the wrong end of a telescope. And these village dreamers inevitably gravitate towards the visitor in their midst, not so much to question him about the democratic traditions of northern Europe and the monuments of the Ciudad Luz but, rather, to hold forth on these subjects themselves, in their jumbled-up way. One of the many ironies you discover when you travel is that the only people who ask you questions about the far-away places you have been to are those who have already travelled themselves.

        Pepe was a tall and handsome man, with a swarthy, hawkish face like a Moor, and he would come around after the day's work to converse, and give us all sorts of often-useful advice. But the best thing he taught us was how to cook lamb kidneys in white wine sauce, a popular dish called riñones al Jerez. I can still see him under the low-wattage light bulb, philosophically stirring the thick gravy made of fried bread and crushed almonds and white wine, with the glistening crescents of meat bobbing up to the surface everywhere. It is definitely the best way to cook kidneys and I remember the dear man every time, or almost every time, I make the dish myself.

        The kitchen in the houses of Montefrio always stood apart from the main building, in the corral or backyard, to keep out the smoke and fumes, because all the cooking was done on charcoal embers, which had to be lit with a ball of paper and then vigorously fanned. And it would be many years before the villagers had running water at home. My sturdy companion Lilo had to fill our jugs and buckets at the fountain behind the house, all on her own since we were told that it would have been unthinkable for me, as a man, to assist her, because this was trabajo de mujeres. In Montefrio then as today, there are cosas que no se hacen _ some things one just doesn't do. I remember seeing, from our balcony, a man carry water from the fountain to his house, because his wife was sick they said. But he did it after midnight when no one could see him, and he used buckets rather than the traditional cántaro, the big clay jug, which could only be carried comfortably slung half sideways under the arm, and resting on one hip thrust out, in a womanly way.

        As for me, I had nothing against going to the spring in principle, but it wouldn't have done to be mixed up with all those cackling women! High up in my tower I could see the stream of water which splashed out of the jugs and flowed down to the crossroads. There was another stream, too, that of the chatter produced by the vecinas, which rose to my ears from behind the house like a band of magpies in a cherry tree. I always marvelled at the way the village women had of talking to one another without really saying anything, as if they wanted to throw up a friendly bridge of sound without giving away any secrets which could, God forbid, one day be turned against them. It was so different to the countries I came from, where people, when they meet, say precisely what they have to say, before going about their business.

xx