Parrot in the Pepper Tree (21 page)

Not long after Ben’s all-too-brief stay, I signed up at the guitar school in Granada. This wasn’t just Mr Toad-like suggestibility, but an emergency measure for the harmony of our home. Ana and Chloë, having sampled the higher plane of Ben’s playing, were having a bit of difficulty adjusting back down to the earthier terrain of my own. Ana particularly was reaching the end of her tolerance of my constant practice sessions and would resort to acts of virtual warfare, ranging from the gratuitous use of a coffee grinder to incitement of the animals.

Then, one day, she cracked completely. I had been explaining how lucky she was to have a guitarist like me about the place to fill the house with sweet music — a little provocative, I own —when she turned on me.

‘Chris, I really don’t think you can call that music!’ she said. ‘It’s absolutely intolerable and there’s not a woman on the planet who’d put up with it. Bobble’obble’obble’obble all day long…’ And she gave me a passable and even funny, imitation of a guitar doing a bad tremolo. It took the wind out of my sails and I laughed.

‘It’s not funny,’ she growled, keeping the tone censorious. ‘What I suggest is that from now on you go and practise in the study or, better still, the sheep shed, and then, when you’re good and ready you could give us a recital — once a week, at the most — and Chloë and I will listen, and maybe even clap.’

I turned to Chloë. I know it’s wrong to put your daughter in the middle of a serious domestic rift, but this did also concern her. Her musical education was, after all, at risk. ‘What do you think, Chloë?’ I asked — she was sitting at the table concentrating rather too closely on her schoolwork — ‘Do you think that’s fair?’

Chloë looked distressed. She hated being placed in such a delicate diplomatic position. ‘No, Daddy,’ she mumbled. ‘It’s not? Then with her hand disguising the giggle that was about to erupt, she added: ‘Those poor, poor sheep?

And so it was that one midwinter afternoon I strode out with my guitar and headed for Granada. I arrived in Orgiva just too late for the bus, so I walked out of town and stuck my thumb out. It was years since I’d last hitch-hiked but within three minutes I was speeding along, chatting away to a young
Granadina
on her way home to the city from a holiday in the Alpujarra.

The light was fading as I slogged my way up the Cuesta del Chápiz, where the school stood at the top of a steep cobbled hill. The climb warmed me a little; as the sun dropped behind the rooftops a wicked chill had crept through the streets of the city. Behind the great wooden door of the
Escuela Carmen de las Cuevas
was a pretty patio with pots of aspidistras and a little stone fountain. In the patio there milled about a motley gaggle of girls and boys, weaving uncertainly among each other’s guitar-cases, wondering which language to speak.

At forty-eight I wasn’t quite the old man of the class — that was Jean-Paul who was well into his fifties — but the rest were much younger: weekend musicians, students, drifters, a clown from Munich. They were a nice rag-bag of bohemians. However, I felt the discrepancy in age acutely. Images of Herb from my youthful years in Seville came flooding back and with them the slightly paranoid idea that my fellow students saw me as an anachronism, someone who had wandered onto the wrong stage set. Whenever anyone addressed a question or comment to me I couldn’t help but feel that there was another question lurking beneath its surface — ‘Hell, man, why bother?’

I even thought I detected an odd sort of look from Nacho, who ran the place, when I went into the office to register. Leaning my guitar against the wall I smiled indulgently when he asked which course I intended to take. ‘Well, I’m certainly not a beginner,’ I assured him. ‘I mean I’ve been playing for almost thirty years.’

‘So what are you, then..?’ asked Nacho.

A certain modesty, almost certainly misplaced, made me hesitate to put my name down for advanced class. ‘I suppose I’d better go with the intermediates,’ I said self-deprecatingly.

‘Right, then,’ said Nacho. ‘Ten o’clock tomorrow, you’ll be upstairs with Emilio.’

I went off, a little hesitantly, to the flat I had been assigned and, sitting on a chair in the icy kitchen, started practising for my first encounter with Emilio. In the other room I could hear the German clown, Horst, who had signed himself up for the beginners’ class. Horst was getting a nice rounded tone from his guitar, and his tremolo was deliciously smooth.

I started into some thumb exercises that I hadn’t done for years, and soon realised just what a slob my thumb had become. Next I did some gruelling
rasgueado
work, shooting each of my four fingers down hard across all the strings, making sure the little finger and the ring finger came down as strongly as their big brothers.

It was cold and getting colder. After an hour I could feel a nasty pain setting into the tiny muscles at the top of my ring finger. A nagging pain.

‘Horst,’ I called out. ‘Let’s get out of here, go find something to eat…’ Horst, whose playing had been getting more sluggish and frozen by the minute, emerged stiffly from his room. We exchanged polite pleasantries about each other’s playing, and headed out into the icy night to scour the Albaicin quarter in search of sustenance.

Horst was what the Spanish call
pesado
— a little ‘heavy’ or earnest — not unlike the clowns I’d known in the circus. Still, once we had found a restaurant, and a bottle of red wine was on the table, we both eased up, and soon I was hooting with laughter at his Teutonic line in scatological jokes.

That night, however, I was troubled by strange dreams in which Emilio and the intermediate students featured. We had run into a group of the intermediates on the way back from dinner. They were Americans, apart from a cheerful chap from somewhere in the bogs of the Low Countries, with the appealing name of Ale-Jan van Donk. Among the Americans were a couple of Californians called Brent and Kirk, and a very tall man called Elin, who looked a bit like a warlock with his cloak-like overcoat and mane of shiny black hair. He looked even stranger in my dream, with long white fingers topped with plastic nails, and a hooked-back thumb — actually a not unusual deformity of flamenco guitarists. Crazy with energy, the dream Elin rapped out his
rasgueados
with those powerful plastic nails, with a sound like machine-gun fire.

My own dream playing was strangely doleful. I fear the technical term for it might have been geriatric.

It was with a certain trepidation that I pushed open the door of the classroom. The Californians were already playing and looked self-consciously cool as I entered and asked if this was Emilio’s class. ‘Yeah,’ they said in unison and got their heads back down to their playing, crisp and neat, with perfect
compás
— rhythm and accents in all the right places.

Ale-Jan came in a few minutes later, grinned at me, looked a little disconcertedly at the Californians, and raised an eyebrow. And then at last the great man, Emilio, pitched into the room. A wiry gypsy with horn-rimmed glasses, long thinning hair, darting eyes and what looked like a cruel smile, he looked us over briefly, then clapped his hands to silence the guitars. ‘Right!
Alegrías.
You all know it. Let’s go!’

And they were off, or at least Brent and Kirk were off, ripping into a fast staccato piece. Ale-Jan and I awkwardly fingered our instruments. I didn’t know
Alegrías
at all, and if I did I certainly wouldn’t be able to play it like that.

Discreetly I slipped my guitar back in its case and sneaked cravenly out of the door before the piece had finished. Down the stairs I crept and into the cave where Nacho was putting the beginners through an
alzapúa
exercise — playing the string with both the downstroke and the upstroke of the thumb. He looked up at me and my thirty years of guitar playing with an amused but friendly grin and paused the class. ‘Welcome, Maestro!’ he greeted me.

I wanted to disappear into a corner but that was impossible. The cave where the beginners did their stuff was used for dance classes and the walls were lined with mirrors. This made my humiliating entrance all the more humiliating: not only could I see all those humble beginners looking up at me, but I could see myself seeing them seeing me, as if in a simultaneous re-run.

I took my place, though, and a few minutes later drew some comfort as Ale-Jan slunk in. I wasn’t the only pretender.

The days of practice unfolded as we novices strived to follow Nacho’s instructions, and to pick out the sound of his own playing amid our own. This wasn’t easy since we all seemed to be playing just slightly out of sync, and as Nacho explained a finer point, there always seemed to be some silly bugger loudly practising the bit we had just learned.

Still, when we played through a piece we were learning together in a sort of sloppy unison, it seemed we were really. quite good — an illusion that was shattered each time Nacho pointed at one of us to play alone, and it turned out that most of us really hadn’t a clue.

The most confident-looking among the beginners was a Frenchman called Jean-Paul, who introduced himself as a professional musician. However, he refused to play on his own at all. ‘I am a very timide personne,’ he explained. ‘I know zees stuff but I need to practise before I can play wiz zeez people.’ Rather than rely on memory or observation, he chose to record the lessons on a very high-tech machine, to pore over once he got back to France. I had a listen to his recording of the first lesson — the one with my entrance — and it was hideous, the cacophony multiplied so that you couldn’t make out a single useful phrase.

Strangely, Jean-Paul seemed to have a contempt for flamenco method and would repeatedly bring the lesson to a halt: ‘But Nacho, zat ees a ridiculeuse way to make zat sound. Ees very more easy when you do eet like zis, non?’ Then he would propose his own inept version. He kept this up all week. ‘Wiz four fingeurs?! But zat ees clearly completely
impossible,
nobody can do zat wiz four fingeurs — neveure. It is bettaire to do eet wiz three,
comme ça…’

Nacho maintained an admirable patience, explaining over and over again the techniques, while Jean-Paul would release an oath and with a Gallic shrug look round the rest of the class for support. But we were all with Nacho, and over the fortnight, most of us began to make real progress.

I certainly felt that I had improved, even though I was playing through the pain barrier, as the unaccustomed work gave me a hideous pain in the little muscles on the top of the finger, and my nails, worn thin by ceaseless playing, started to crack up.

At the end of the course, my nails actually required superglue to keep them in place. But I’d achieved what I came for. It was time to return to El Valero and impress the womenfolk.

WWOOF IS AN ACRONYM FOR WORKING WEEKENDS ON ORGANIC FARMS. This concept started about thirty years ago, with the intention of helping struggling organic farmers with their labour-intensive endeavours, while also enabling city families with an interest in the countryside to get out there and into it, hoeing and weeding in the mud. The organisation has expanded and now, as
Willing Workers On Organic Farms,
provides a network of eccentric addresses to visit in almost any part of the globe. That’s the
wwoof
hosts. The willing workers, or
wwoofers,
are a band of peripatetic young and not so young who are happy to exchange some labour for board and lodging in a beautiful landscape.

Part of the
wwoof
idea is that the farmers teach the
wwoofers
about organic farming but the reality is that the farmers often pick up as much as they share. Travelling from farm to farm the
wwoofers
are a valuable conduit of information for isolated and often uncommunicative farmers.

El Valero had obvious
wwoof
potential: a beautiful farm, whose owners had no spare cash for labour. So, over the years, we have taken on a string of
wwoofers,
most of them wonderful, though with the odd slob thrown in.

Gudrun and Jaime, our most recent
wwoofers,
were perhaps the most memorable of the lot.