The Pritchett Century (26 page)

The radio blares from every street corner, but it is not often blaring the last American songs and dance tunes. Almost always the tune is
flamenco
, or
cante hondo
, a song from a popular
zarzuela
or musical comedy, a Spanish march. Once one is across the frontier, one is aware of being outside of Europe musically. One hears a new cadence, haunting, monotonous, yet also of pronounced dramatic rhythm. It is the rhetoric of music, sometimes tragic and grave, sometimes swanking and feverish with a swirl of skirts in it, sometimes Oriental and gypsy-like, lyrical and sad. The ear catches the strange notes of the cadence at once—la, sol, fa, mi—in the singing voice or in the guitar.

After midnight in Madrid, when one has just finished dinner one goes off into those packed, narrow streets lying off the Puerta del Sol in the middle of the city. They are streets of small bars crowded with men roaring away at each other, drinking their small glasses of beer or wine, tearing shellfish to bits and scattering their refuse and the sugar-papers of their coffee on the floors. The walls are tiled and in gaudy
colours. The head of a bull will hang there, or some bloody painting of a scene at the bullfight. Through the door at the back of the bar one makes one’s way into a private room, tiled again, like a bathhouse, and furnished only with a table and a dozen chairs. There one can invite a guitarist and singers and listen to
cante flamenco
.

Less respectably, one can find some cellar in the same quarter, some thieves’ kitchen which will probably be closed by the police in a week or two, and there one may hear
cante flamenco
and, even better, the true
cante hondo
, or deep song, brought up in the last thirty years from the south, and sung not for the traveller’s special entertainment but, as it were, privately, for the singer’s own consolation. For, despite its howling, it is also an intimate music, perhaps for a singer and a couple of friends only. It can be sung in a mere whisper. The dirty room, lit by one weak and naked electric-light bulb, is full of wretched, ill-looking men; the proprietor wanders round with a bottle of white wine in his hand filling up glasses. In one corner four men are sitting, with their heads close together, and one notices that one of them is strumming quietly on the table and another is murmuring to himself, occasionally glancing up at his friends, who gravely nod. The finger strumming increases and at last the murmurer breaks into one low word, singing it under the breath in the falsetto voice of the gypsies.
“Ay,”
he sings. Or
“Leli, Leli,”
prolonging the note like a drawn-out sigh, and when he stops, the strumming of the fingers becomes more rapid, building up emotion and tension and obsession, until at last the low voice cries out a few words that are like an exclamation suddenly coming from some unknown person in the dark. What are the words? They are difficult to understand because the gypsies and, indeed, the Andalusians, drop so many consonants from their words that the speech sounds like a mouthful of small pebbles rubbed against one another:

the voice declaims:

wavering on its words and then suddenly ending; and the strumming begins again until the rapid climax of the song,

The manners of the thieves’ kitchen are correct and unmarred by familiarity. A yellow-haired and drunken prostitute may be annoying a man by rumpling his hair, but otherwise the dejected customers at three in the morning are sober. One night, in a place like this in the middle of Madrid, we sat next to one of these private artists who was murmuring away to his friends. When we nodded our admiration to the whispering singer, he sang a polite love song of delightful conceit to the lady in our party and asked afterwards for “the loan of a cigarette until next Thursday.” He became obviously impatient of a gypsy singer and guitarist who had smelt us out. He objected, on the usual Spanish grounds, that the young singer—who also danced—was not keeping to the rigid requirements of his art, and was introducing un-classical extravagance and stunts in order to show off to foreigners. The criticism was audible. The gypsy, egged on by criticism, scornfully tried to surpass himself. He had a weak chest and was inclined to be wild and raucous on his top notes, but he was not bad. Finding himself still mocked by the quiet man in the corner, the gypsy decided to silence him by a crushing performance, which meant a display of whirling fury. He moved one or two chairs, to make room to dance in: the customers murmured at this move. They were prepared to put up with it and hold their hand. But when the gypsy started taking off his jacket—the supreme symbol of male respectability in Spain—there was that alarming and general shout of
“¡Eso no!”
—“None of
that!
”
—
from everyone in the room, and half the men stood up. The proprietor rushed out at him. The gypsy put back his jacket. He knew he had gone too far.

Performances of this kind, in which some players fasten themselves on the tourist and give their performance, are usually paid for with a
bottle of brandy and a cigarette or two; or, in smarter surroundings when there is a special invitation, by money. One pays up and hopes for the best, but we had a large, quiet Yorkshireman in our party whose air of Saxon shyness concealed a deep knowledge of the Spanish vernacular and an obstinate respect for correct procedure. Our young gypsy made the error of asking the Yorkshireman a special fee because he was a professional artist giving an unusual performance, and when this was refused there was a characteristic row. It began on the doorstep of the cellar, continued in the street, trailed down to the middle of the Puerta del Sol. It was a hot night; the clock on the Ministry of the Interior coldly struck four, while the gypsy shouted, the Yorkshireman argued back. The gypsy called for witnesses. At four in the morning the recognized authority of the streets is the night watchmen. They came out one by one from their doorways like the Watch of Fielding’s London, and with them the strange night population who sleep out in doorways or the streets. The gypsy stuck out his chest, produced his official papers. The crowd listened. A woman, a lottery-ticket seller, recommended going to the police station, and on the whole the crowd were against us, until the gypsy made a fatal mistake of overplaying his hand. From his papers he picked out some document.

“I am an artist,” he cried. They nodded sympathetically.

“I was a soldier of Franco,” he added, showing more papers. They stepped back from him at once.

“None of that,” someone said politely.

Among the common people of Madrid one is not likely to get very far with being a soldier of Franco.

The dispute now left the chest-baring, chest-thumping, and paper-showing stage, to insults like:

“You are boring me. Go away.”

“On the contrary, it is you who are boring me.”

The quarrel trailed off to the police station, but within sight of it the gypsy gave in. It was not the time for face-saving. The gypsy said he had no wish to quarrel. The Yorkshireman said he loved the greatness of the Spanish nation. The gypsy said he loved the greatness of the English nation. A year later I was astonished to see my friends had
engaged this gypsy to sing again. He had a young wife now. The gypsy was not at all surprised. Such rows are common in Spain.

“It is better,” he said, “to begin a friendship with a little aversion.”

His wife, a little round thing of sixteen, eight months pregnant and with pretty eyes as dark as linseed, sat with the dignity of a little duchess on her chair. She sang with the wit and grace of an angel one moment, and the next could let out the gutter howl of her race and the distorted vowels of her tongue, with the resonance of a hammer on the anvil. Strong, good-humoured and quick to catch the slightest allusion in talk, she had already acquired that matriarchal force, militancy, and content characteristic of Spanish women, and her young husband, ill from the grim night-life of the streets and bars, anxious and excitable, seemed superior to her only in his power of indifference.

As the singer of
cante flamenco
proceeds, his friends nod and wait for him to reach the few difficult ornamental notes of the little song, which has been sung entirely for this short crisis of virtuosity. It breaks suddenly, and then the voice flows cleverly away, to the murmurs of
Olé, Olé
, by his friends. After a long interval, in which all seem to be savouring the satisfaction the song has given them, one of the others takes his turn and so, in this low whispering, like musing aloud or like grief and sobs, they will pass their evenings.

Cante hondo
or
cante flamenco
is not commonly heard in this quiet fashion. The Spaniards love noise, and the singing is usually done at the top of the voice, but the same collusive demeanour of the party will be observed. They listen, nodding, seeming to be waiting for some unknown, intimate moment; an audience will go on talking with indifference, at the beginning of a song, for they are interested only in the few bars that test the singer. They react to every syllable of that passage and when the singer has reached it, when the most tortured ornament the voice can utter is before him, they fall dead silent as they do at some high moment of the bullfight. The peculiarity of a
cante hondo
is that it is sung within “a compass which rarely exceeds the limits of a sixth, which is not composed solely of nine semitones” (I quote from Trend’s translation of Falla’s work on the subject) “as is the case with our tempered scale. By the employment of the enharmonic genus, there is a considerable increase in the number of tones which
the singer can produce.” Metrical feeling is often destroyed and one seems to be listening to a sudden, lyrical or passionate statement or exclamation, torn out of the heart of the singer.

Cante hondo
is the name given to this kind of singing in its pure form.
Cante flamenco
is the modern popular name for it and covers its more florid variations. The word
“flamenco”
is a mysterious word, literally meaning Flemish, which has come to mean popular, vulgar, exuberant. A loud and free behaviour—for Spaniards usually comport themselves with gravity and reserve—is called
“muy flamenco.”
The word is half abusive, half indulgent, and is thought to have come in when Charles V brought his Flemish court to Spain. The Spaniard, who has always derided foreigners and blamed all his misfortunes on them, thought of the Flemings as outlandish.
Flamenco
singing has been despised in the past and it has only become common all over Spain since Falla held a congress of
flamenco
singers in Granada in 1922, when he was exploring the history and growth of Spanish folk music.

What the world outside of Spain regards as “typically Spanish music” was fixed in the 1880’s of the last century by
Carmen
, a manifestation of the romantic view of Spain fostered by Gautier and Mérimée and other French writers. It really has its roots in the eighteenth century. There is a good deal of street music and the barrel organ in it, but in fact
Carmen
has one or two indigenous Spanish things to say, as Trend points out. The Spanish idiom came out in the
zarzuelas
or musical comedies of the century; there are traces of it in the seventeenth century and there are motifs that have been traced back to the songs sung by the shepherds of Castile in the fifteenth century. The interesting thing is that one of the orchestral interludes from
Carmen
is really an Andalusian
polo
, and a
polo
is really
cante hondo
.

But
cante hondo
is not like the rest of Spanish folk music, which recalls the gay, gracious, tinkling folk songs of Russia, and indeed of all European countries. The words often amusingly convey a purely Spanish foible.
Cante hondo
is Andalusian, but it is not Andalusian folk music which has felt the influence of the Byzantine liturgy and of the Moors.
Cante hondo
is gypsy; it has a lot in common with Indian singing. It contains the melancholy, the fury, the lyrical and tragic feeling
of that wandering race. Though it may be sung at some gypsy feast, with the old gypsy gripping the bars of his chair outside his cave dwelling, as he mouths his way towards the notes, the prolonged and tortured “a’s” and “o’s,” the “l” turned into an
“r,”
the effect is of soliloquy, an utterance out of loneliness, an utterance of tragic memory, hate, vengeance, or derision. Some are, indeed, called
soleares
(the Spanish word
“soledades”
in the gypsy pronunciation), songs of solitude:

Some, simply
coplas
, or verses:

Falla organized his congress in Granada thirty years ago in order to preserve
cante hondo
, and spoke of its “grave, hieratic melody.” Hieratic it is; in another form, the
saeta
, it is sung to convey the agony of religious desire and remorse, as the images of the Christ or the Virgin are borne round the white-walled streets of Seville in the nights of Holy Week. But the modern tendency has been to get away from the severe, classical design of this pattern of sound which seems to cut the southern night like a knife, to stir in one animal feelings of fear, cruelty, and pity. The more florid, rasping, less inhibited
flamenco
versions are replacing the older form. One hears a good deal too much of the nasal howl let out in a voice that whines and strains the blood vessels. The Spanish voice is harsh, powerful, and dry, as if there were sand in the singer’s throat, in any case. Impatient of restraint, the Spanish popular arts are quickly spoiled by exuberance. Spanish fury, when it is aroused in life or simulated in art, is terrifying, for it is carried to the limit of frenzy. Nothing grips the Spaniards so much as the dancer whirling herself into a state of mad, dishevelled passion, and the gypsies are unsurpassed in these transports and climaxes of abandon.