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IV. Flamenco Summer

        When I call the summer of 1961 "flamenco", it isn't only because it was filled with the music itself - in the corner of a tavern, at the barber shop of Rafael (our only guitarist), or in the Moorish mirador atop the ancient house in which we lived _ but simply because the spirit of flamenco filled everything. The word is sometimes used in Spanish to describe a person who is "fiery, dashing, passionate", and it is in this sense which I use it here.

    In the morning Lilo would go down to buy milk from the goatherd who drove his flock through the streets - you gave him your saucepan and he milked a goat while you waited. But when we had been up all night with our moonlit music parties, or juergas, in the lookout tower, we would rise well after Lopez had gone past with his herd, and have our breakfast on the back porch of the Café Español. There was a fig tree that seemed to be loaded with ripe fruit all summer long - brevas in July and higos in September, because fig trees bear twice. As we sipped our café con leche, the gypsy bootblack known to all as Culebra ("snake", because he had the low brow and beady eyes of a rattlesnake) would climb up the tree and pick a few handfuls of night-cool, purple-black figs for us to eat with our churros. In the days before everyone had fridges, no Spaniard would have dreamt of picking a fig at any time but breakfast.

        Tapas time began several hours later, when the streets became redolent of deep-fried squid and roasting chorizo. Los amigos could usually be found in La Fonda or any of the many taverns tucked away in unlikely, and even unimaginable places, on the winding alleys and staircases of the village. And if you couldn't find the person you wanted, you just had to ask Maria Platillo Volante and she either told you immediately, or made it her business to inform the interested party where you were, so that you were soon enjoying a glass of Moriles with your chum.

        Maria was the town peanut-vendor. In her black dress and slippers she roamed the bars with a broad basket over her arm, supplying the drinkers with avellanas, as the villagers wrongly called them, confusing peanuts with hazelnuts. She got her strange nickname, "Mary the Flying Saucer", by which she is known until today, even though the reason has been largely forgotten, because she was constantly "orbiting" around the town, like the UFO's and Russian space satellites that were then all the rage.

        Maria's life had been "ruined" by a scoundrel who after giving her five children married someone else. She lived with her anaemic brood in a cellar on the Calle Santo Cristo, sustaining them all on her peanut sales, which literally amounted to what we would call "peanuts". The village men who were her customers, given that women never went to bars unless it was on Sunday morning after Mass with their husbands for their weekly glass of sherry, treated her affectionately but rather too condescendingly, I thought. They were wont to cracking off-colour jokes and even helping themselves to her peanuts while she was telling the others to tomar por culo, which in Spain, it should be said in her defence, means nothing worse than "drop dead". She was a fallen woman, una desgraciada, so with her sons still in short pants she had no one to defend her honour, which made her fair game, although it should also be said in my friends' defence that they were not really crueller to her than they were, behind closed doors, to their own wives.

 

       

Lilo immediately made her our friend, for Maria was, like Lilo, a lady with great spiritual qualities, as one could see from her soulful eyes. We would sometimes give her a few hours of work making our lunch, and I can see her in my mind's eye now, smiling sadly as she stirs her delicious revuelto of eggplants and potatoes in garlic and olive oil, in the long-handled pan set over the coals.

        Sometimes I would get up early and walk out of the village with Cristobal, while he delivered the bread to the farmhouses. He wore a grey cotton waistcoat and cap and broad cotton trousers, and led a mule laden with hemp-woven saddlebags, full of big loaves of bread. On the way he would sing the chants we all loved, la caña, which was the wagoneer's song, and la petenera, the song of a beautiful Jewess, a harlot who bewitched her Christian customers.

        He did not have Manolo's magical subtlety, but it was wonderful to hear, along the white roads in the fresh mountain air. When "breakfast" time came (they only drank coffee or anisette upon rising, and had their real breakfast in mid-morning) we would stop in the shade of an almond tree to share un canto de pan y aceite, "a corner of bread and oil". He would take out his curved jack-knife and cut a big piece from the side, or "corner" of one of the round loaves. Then he carved a wedge of dough from the interior and filled the hole with thick, green olive oil from a small bottle he carried in his pouch, with the cork attached to the neck by a string. He replaced the wedge, and when the oil had been properly absorbed, broke it in two. This was eaten with a cucumber that we peeled and held in one hand like a banana, and washed down with water from his clay pipote, a jug with a thin spout like a teapot. Cristobal filled the vessel at a nearby fountain and then held it in the air so that the water poured in a stream into his open mouth.

        Although we seemed very strange to them - una alemana with a crewcut and un inglés with hair that for those pre-hippie years was very long - it never occurred to anyone to ask if, for example, we were married. We came from a different world, where their laws did not apply. All they knew was that we were in their village - the first foreigners they had ever seen - and that we liked it and came back often. Because of this we were welcome in every home, from the poorest hovel to our señorito Don Curro's manor, the Torre del Sol, west of town.

        That was where I got the sunburn, sitting by his swimming pool, the only one in Montefrio. Curro had built it for the English and Swiss girls he brought up from Torremolinos, where his parents had a villa. But he never bathed in it himself, since in his way of thinking, the proper place for a man of quality was la sombra, the shade. Direct exposure to the sun and elements was a curse inflicted on field labourers and fishermen only, which is why he _ wisely _ preferred to sit down under an awning, fully dressed, and watch the beautiful extranjeras, most of whom seemed to be airline stewardesses, disporting themselves in those two-piece bathing suits which were still banned on Spanish beaches.

        When Lilo and I were bathing there one lazy afternoon, I became absorbed in the reading of Don Quijote de la Mancha. I had covered my back with a shirt but forgotten about my legs, which were hanging in the water. I am very fair-skinned and had been burned badly on the back once before, in Acapulco, but I did not think the same would happen to my legs…

        By the time we got home that evening I was howling with pain, and spent the next two weeks in bed, with my skin bright red from the knees up. This caused some wonderment in the town, since it was the first case of sunburn they had ever witnessed. Only the cortijeros exposed themselves to the sun in those days, and they had skins like well-tanned leather.

        The pain became so unbearable that Lilo had to call in our local practicante, Don Juan, who back then was very thin and wore a Franco-style moustache, to inject me with a sleeping potion. She was out when he arrived, and I remember seeing him down the stairs after the shot and then barely making it back up to the bed before being struck completely unconscious. In those days the médico was a proud figure who rarely left his office and charged dearly for his services, so these paramedics or male nurses ended up delivering most of the babies and closing the eyes of most of the deceased, making them figures of monumental popularity, such as the long-retired Don Juan is today.

        The one I wanted to be with all the time was Manolo, Manolo the artist - perhaps the only one I ever knew intimately who really deserved the name. In fact he was a poet, a singing poet, because, like all real poets, he was incapable of uttering a word that was not poetry, even though he never wrote a line. He would not speak of singing a particular verse, but of "saying" it, because, in the medieval tradition, he was a singing poet, declaiming his tales and philosophical maxims.

        Together we wandered, we talked, and whenever the urge seized him, he sang. I heard him sing among his olive trees on the hillside called Vaciacámaras, and in the ruins of the great 16th century church on the cliff, before the hole in the roof - caused by the famous lightning bolt of 1767 - was repaired. I heard him sing among the stalactites of the caves in Las Peñas de los Gitanos, and I heard him sing on the Calvary Hill overlooking the village, where I took that eerie photograph of him, with his arms raised and the great vein standing out on his forehead.

        In September there was a livestock fair which brought hundreds, or perhaps even thousands of farmers, each with his waistcoat and boots and walking stick, callao, hanging over his arm, to buy and sell horses, mules and donkeys. The two gypsy brothers, Melchor and José, who were horse dealers by trade, invited me to get up on a mare they had - my first ride bareback - which promptly began to run across the field, with me hanging on to the mane, until a man in the crowd got hold of its dangling bridle and saved my life, or so it seemed to me.

        Their father was an imposing fellow with great moustaches called Guillermo, whom I always thought of as the King of the Gypsies. Like all gypsy patriarchs, he had total authority over his children, even when they were grown men themselves. Once, as we stood in a circle in the Plaza, Melchor - who then was about 25 and had several children of his own - said something that apparently displeased his father, who, without saying a word, slapped his face. To my amazement, Melchor acquiesced, hanging his head in shame.

        But that did not mean that they were not proud. When Melchor admired a bright yellow knitted tie I had brought from New York, and which I was rather tired of (we were all very dapper then) I said that I would give it to him. The next time we met in the Plaza, among the usual group of gypsies, I took it out of my jacket pocket and offered it to him, but he frowned and hurriedly motioned me to put it back. "Later", he whispered, "when we're alone".

        As for my life with Lilo, it was too soon for the big trouble to begin, but there was an advance signal, in the spectacular form of a tossed flowerpot. My friend Anthony came from Austria where he was studying German to spend a few weeks with us, and one night, after he and I had been up late talking in the kitchen, thoughtlessly leaving Lilo alone upstairs as young people will do, we decided to go out for a walk.

        But as soon as we closed the door behind us and stepped into the sultry silence of the street, there was a great explosion, with earth and leaves flying everywhere. We looked up at the balcony of the bedroom. Lilo was no longer there, nor was the large flowerpot of geraniums... The problem was that Lilo had always had me to herself, and I had adjusted my outpourings to her serious, German way of reasoning. When she heard me chattering freely in my naturally irreverent Anglo-Saxon way, she didn't like it. She even came to call it "devilish and decadent".

        But Anthony went away, carrying a pitchfork made from a single tree into the plane on the Armilla airfied because it wouldn't fit in the luggage compartment, and for a short while more, all was harmony and understanding. Such are the perils of being a cultural chameleon - one's diversity can be misconstrued as duplicity. But before we left for devilish and decadent Paris, at the end of the summer, we did something which, as an American would say, was right up her Wagnerian alley (and Lilo's surname was in fact Wagner). We spent three nights sleeping in a tomb.

        Several miles east of Montefrio lies the vast region known as Las Peñas de los Gitanos - The Cliffs of the Gypsies. We decided to get closer to the mysteries of the Bronze Age by sleeping in one of the prehistoric "dolmens", or megalithic tombs, which litter the floor of the great canyon.

        We left the town with El Gordo and his donkey, laden with earthenware water jugs, two sheep skins, bread, sausages, tins of sardines and tomatoes, to the amazement of the onlookers, who murmured to one another, "¡Van a dormir con los muertos! _ They're going to sleep with the dead!".

        We filled the small mortuary chamber with branches and leaves, and spread Manolo's fluffy zaleas on top of them, where we slept comfortably enough. Cristobal came out every day with his mule to bring us fresh bread and see how we were getting along. We saw no spirits from the Bronze Age, or the Copper Age either, but we did get a portentous glimpse of the shape of things to come. Each night before going to bed _ or "to tomb", if you wish _ we lay out on the great slab of rock which covered our curious home, watching the shooting stars of August, the lágrimas de San Lorenzo as they're called, because they occur around my saint's day, the 10th.

        On the first night, I noticed that one of them was not "shooting" but sailing steadily across the black sky. Slowly it dawned on me that we were having our first sight of one of the amazing Russian or American space satellites circling the earth. I could only tell it apart from the stars because, like us, it was moving, on an even but uncharted course, towards the future.

 

 

My own sweet self, in Montefrio - 1961