Click here to go to the home page of Casas de Lorenzo in Montefrio, Granada, Andalucia. Villa and cottage rental, holiday homes in Andalucia, rural homes in Granada Province, vacation homes in rural Andalusia
Visit Lorenzo's website relating his travels in France and richly illustrated with his own photographs. The site includes Lorenzo's pen-and-ink postcards of Paris and Provence. Click on www.french-places.com
The Photograph
Although the tale I want to tell begins on Christmas day, I admit that the specifically Christmasy part of it ends there. The reader will however, I am sure, forgive me for not sticking to my subject, once she or he discovers how gripping the substance of the story is. With a good stretch of the imagination it might even be said to have a Christmasy message, similar to the famous English one about the watch fob and the comb.
I had by that time already made friends with Franci, the aspiring young guitarist who is now a Mallorca entrepreneur, and his outspoken mother Custodia, whose nickname is La Nana, or The Midget. Knowing how keen I am on flamenco, Custodia told me to be in the plaza on Christmas morning to see how the gypsies did it. I was there with my camera and got some amusing shots of the goings-on.
The gypsies love being photographed and usually put special fire into their dancing if they know that it is being recorded for posterity, but that day - for the first and only time since - I got resistance, from one man. This picturesque fellow, with his slouched hat, long moustache, waistcoat and cane hanging from his arm, belonged to a family whose members are all virtually unable to speak – they are even known in the village as los mudos. He was walking with his two equally picturesque, and mute, sisters, with their long skirts and extraordinary hatchet-faces, behind me up the hill when I swerved around to take a picture of them all. But the man angrily waved his arm in my direction and made a series of unintelligible noises which clearly indicated that he did not want to be photographed.
I would have forgotten about this tiny cloud on the horizon completely, had it not been for a visit I received at my cortijo near the village, no less than 8 years later, by the two mute sisters, by this time well on in age. All I could understand from their imploring grunts and gesticulations were the words "mi papá" and "retrato", my Dad and picture, so I drove them back into town and found one of their neighbours who could explain.
It seemed that their father had recently died but they only had a single photograph to remember him by, taken when he did his military service sometime around the Civil War, and that they had been lamenting on this fact among the neighbours. But when my friend Custodia heard about it, she said she recalled that el inglé (me) had taken some pictures one Christmas Day years ago in which she was certain that their father appeared.
As is well known, some peoples believe that photographs capture a person´s soul, and even though this may not strictly apply to the Andalucian gypsies, there can be no doubt that for many of them a photograph is more than just a piece of printed paper representing someone at a fleeting moment in his or her life. Just ask my friend the local photographer, Federico, and he´ll tell you how, when the gypsies come to have their portraits taken, they refuse to have just their faces or upper parts photographed, and demand to have their whole bodies included in the view, from snap-brimmed hat to shiny shoes... The two sisters, therefore, were persuaded that I, el inglé, was harbouring somewhere among my possessions the only living icon of their departed father ever to be taken after he had engendered them and their other mute siblings, and they wanted it.
I went through all of my old photos that night but couldn´t find them – they must have been left in the storage room of my mother-in-law´s house on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro, when I brought Nina and her mum to Spain, and they´re probably still there today, unless the Brazilian humidity or burglars have done away with them. But the sisters wouldn´t accept this explanation, perhaps because they had no idea that "Brasil" was much too far away for me to go there just for them, and they kept coming back to my door, entreating me each time with greater pathos to release this precious document without which they were unable to properly mourn their father.
At last, I broke down and decided to set aside an entire morning to going through the big box of negatives stored in my attic. After some hours I found the strips of film taken that Christmas Day, and, unable to identify any elderly male face who could possibly be their father, took them to Federico to have them all developed.
The sisters, when shown them, immediately pounced on a shot of at least thirty people, some dancing and others standing about, pointing excitedly at the figure of a man in a shabby grey suit and hat... but with his back turned to the camera. Only part of his face, with the characteristic sideburn and moustache, could be seen. I exclaimed incredulously, "But you can´t see his face!", to which they chortled in unison – and this time I could understand all three words they spoke – "Pero es él! – But it´s him!".
I suppose I should wind up this strange but true story by saying that it made me really feel like Father Christmas. The two sisters adore me to this day, always hailing me as I drive past in incoherent monosyllables, and they even give me special rebates on the laundry baskets I buy from them for my rental cottages.
But the most touching thing is that their brother, the one who once gruffly refused to let me photograph him, came personally to express, as he best he could, his gratitude precisely for having taken, and given them, the picture of his father.
He even invited me to their house to have a beer and eat some ham, which I never did. I should have thought at the time of asking him to let me, finally, take his own photo, because not long ago he went the way of his dear papá. So all I can do for the man now, by way of a portrait, is to draw him from memory, going past my door, as he used to do almost every day, walking slightly ahead of his sisters.
