III. The Butcher Who Sang Like a Bird

        In spite of the rapid changes which were beginning to affect Spain in the early 1960's, Montefrio seemed timeless. Every time I came back from Paris there were the same smells of frying olive oil and goat droppings, and there were the same slippery pebbles on the streets, which swarmed with almost as many four-legged beasts as today, under their cover of cast concrete, they do with four-wheeled ones. There were also the threadbare little fiestas without truckloads of sound equipment, which one didn't have to be a progress-thirsty provincial to enjoy. But, for me, in my fascination with the eccentric and the bizarre, there was, antes de todo, Manolo.

        Many people think of Manolo as a gifted and original singer, which he certainly was, but I remember him as a very special, and at the same time very Spanish, man. Other writers, describing him in his later and more glorious years, compared him to a "gnarled grape vine" and "a butcher who sang like a bird", and both images are appropriate. When my mother painted his picture, during the winter she spent in Montefrio, he kept falling asleep, so she simply showed him with his eyes shut. Being naturally haggard and gaunt, the similarity with a corpse was not lost on anyone, especially the hyper-sensitive model himself. "¡Me ha pintao muerto!", he would complain indignantly, for years after - "She painted me dead".

        When I first came to Montefrio, he had his carniceria on the Calle Alta, in the place where there is now a shoe shop, at the corner with the Calle Santo Cristo. There was no comparison with the hygienic, well-stocked butcher shops we have now, with their rosy pink pigs hanging in the cold room and their scales with digital screens, which give the exact price. Manolo's place, even in the relatively unsophisticated 60's, was a throwback to the Civil War, a sort of morgue for unrecognizable scraps of stringy goat or sheep, depending on what he had culled from his flock the day before.

        Every morning, a gaggle of housewives fingered and poked the bloody bits which he hacked up at random and scattered on the counter. The din was constant: Manolo arbitrarily decided what each lump cost, but as soon as he shouted "¡cinco pesetas!" the interested party would scream back "¡tres pesetas!", and so on. Sometimes the argument became so heated that it almost seemed as if he would take his knife to the woman's throat.

        But as soon as he noticed me step down from the street - his amigo inglés, poeta y aficionado - he would open both arms and throw back his head to toss off a copla de cante hondo and then, projecting his voice over the uproar, resume the conversation we had left off the day before, as if nothing had happened since.

        Of course, it was a "Manolo conversation", which could leap suddenly, but somehow always gracefully, from Spain's downfall 300 years ago at the hands of guess-which-pirates, to his arthritis, to the greatest singer of all times (Manuel Torres, because he was dead - the greatest living one could only be himself) and the maddening fact that in a distant country called Sweden the women practiced el amor libre. After this rundown of the things that interested him, he would inevitably pause to remind me, the naive foreigner, of the fact that no one could be trusted. He would often express this sad state of affairs with a saying which may have been a Manolo original, and which I shall leave untranslated, Para conocerle a un hombre, hay que comerse un saco de sal.

        If we were not overheard, he would bemoan the cruel injustice of not having been a moro with a harem of wives, forty of them to be precise. But then some gypsy matron would get hold of a mangled scrap of goat's liver and shout "¡tres pesetas!" and Manolo the butcher, not the philosopher, plunged back into the fray, wild-eyed.

        Other flamenco singers might have surpassed him in virtuosity, but none had the thrilling woody quality of Manolo's voice when, as he put it, he would dar el cambio or "make the change" from one register to the other. It was enough to give you goose-flesh, and Manolo himself would hold out his skinny, veined forearm and pull back the sleeve so that I could witness the impressive number of bumps which he was producing with his own music. Like all true artists, he was the only audience he needed.

        Even more impressive was the great vein in his forehead, which stood out as if it were going to burst, when he was particularly inspired by the sound of his own voice. Recently my old friend Yves Véquaud showed me an extraordinary photograph I sent him back then of Manolo singing atop the hill known as El Calvario, high above the town, with the vein etched out by the setting sun. I no longer had the negative, so I had a copy made and used it to illustrate this story. It was taken in the summer of 1961, when La Villa was still a bare rock without the pine trees, and the steeple of the church was still ruinous, without its pointed roof. Manolo was always neurotically complaining that he felt cold, which is why he is wearing a jacket and scarf in spite of the August heat.

        What with all the current-day official encouragement provided by the new Andalucian Regional Government (prizes, subsidies, razzmatazz), there are many professionally competent flamenco singers on the "flamenco scene", in fact many more than before. But the new breed seem more like vocal athletes than the wandering minstrel, the musical poet who was my friend.

        When I see them sitting on the brightly-lit festival stage or in the softly-lit TV studio, well-paid and well-fed, they remind me, with their prolonged bellows of simulated pain and their massive microphones, of someone at the dentist having a tooth pulled, or - as my father once humorously remarked - on the toilet suffering from acute constipation. Manolo softened his howls of despair with bittersweet irony, and gazed searchingly, almost pleadingly into your eyes, as if he were really trying to say something to you, something which could be expressed no other way than through his beloved siguiriyas and soleares.

        Of course, the lean, gritty atmosphere back then was so much more conducive to "natural" flamenco, the music of suffering par excellence. I recently heard a young cantaor whose car keys were fashionably dangling from his trouser pocket, as he sang a heart-rending, but on his lips rather unconvincing copla about a man whose mother died unattended because he could not afford to call in the doctor.

        But with Manolo, every word was personally felt, even personally experienced. He had served in the Civil War (on the losing side) as a male nurse, jabbing the arms of Anarchist soldiers with his syringe, and spent the rest of his life herding goats and sheep over the hills of Montefrio, day-dreaming and singing as he went, just like the bird of my title.

        After he closed up for the day I would follow him to the matadero, the village slaughterhouse, to get the next day's meat ready. It was a cavernous place, and in Manolo's hands what would normally have been a rather sorry scene took on airs of a pagan ritual. I wrote a poem about it, like the photograph long-since mislaid, speaking of him as a wizard or priest chanting as he sacrificed the lamb, although in reality Manolo just couldn't stop singing, whatever he was doing.

        The poem also spoke of the little girl with long braids who came with a bucket to collect the entrails, which her mother cleaned out at a cement tank. When the High Priest of Flamenco was done, he carried the bucket home with the intestines and blood for Maria to make morcilla - black pudding - for the store. The lid of the bucket was turned upside down to hold the tastier bits of offal, such as the sweetbreads - mollejas - which we would take to my place for Lilo to fry up with olive oil and garlic, for our tapas. I can still see her fanning the charcoal embers under the big pan, while Manolo sang and I poured the white wine.

        While this was being done, I was ordered to put on the record player. I had brought with me from New York a "portable" high-fi set, quite boxy and heavy which created a great impression in the village, since none of the flamenco boys owned a machine on which to hear their favourite singers. I also brought from Madrid a long-playing record of the great singer Antonio Mairena, then at the peak of his career. It caused such a sensation that I had Manolo, Cristobal the baker and the two gypsy brothers, Melchor and José, knocking on the door at every odd moment asking to come in to hear it once more. But once Lado A and Lado B had been solemnly heard, they would treat me to their own improvised concert up on the tower, which was what I wanted.

        After Manolo had listened to the record player and had his wine and mollejas, he would forget about going home for lunch and fell asleep on the big straw-filled mattress we had spread on the floor. Soon he was snoring loudly and a cloud of black flies was hovering around each of his crumpled, smelly socks. Before long María would be wailing up from the street, "Manolo, la comida, Manolo, la morcilla". She was less concerned about him missing lunch than the blood congealing before it went into her big iron pot on the hearth, to make black pudding for sale in the butcher shop.

        Many years later, when he began to win prizes and appear on TV, the villagers granted him a certain amount of respect, but back then he was just plain loco perdío for all but the handful of flamenco lovers. He had two qualities which are most rare among Iberian males, spontaneity and transparency, which is why they misunderstood him, and why I loved him.

        I will close this tribute to my recently deceased friend with an anecdote which caused some grief at the time but which, many years later, he and I would often laugh about as the story of "el tomate de la Lilo".

        Lilo stormed out of his butcher shop one morning and marched up to me in the Plaza, red-faced with Teutonic indignation. It seemed that instead of attending to her properly (as if he ever attended to anyone properly!) Manolo had looked over the contents of her shopping basket and casually taken out a large tomato, which he then proceeded to munch (something he was very fond of) as he unrepentantly turned back to his housewives. In retrospect it sounded silly, just another of Manolo's theatricals, but I was highly influenced by Lilo with her rigorous ideals of behaviour, and stormed into the shop, loudly accusing him of offending my mujer, in front of all of his amazed customers. I got some sharp words in reply, and went off.

        I quickly cooled down and realized how stupid I had been, but the damage was done - I had made him lose face in front of "the others". When I saw him in the street, he turned his back on me, and I went home in despair. This intolerable situation endured for several days, until even Lilo, usually intransigent, realized that it had got out of hand. I wrote him a long letter begging for his forgiveness, and threatening to leave Montefrio immediately if he did not forget what had happened. I put the envelope under his door in the night.

        The next day I ran into him in the Plaza, on the way home with his bucket of offal. He grinned distractedly, and instantly picked up where our last conversation had left off... that is, the last conversation before the tomato.

 

 

Manolo, on the farm - 1961