Taut Tangos

Standing before the bleak gate, I saw no sign nor heard noise that would betray a hint of commotion within. Without, the night held in its airs a sort of agitated yet limp festivity: behind me, in an inner court crowned by a fountain, young men and women wandered vaguely, stirred into Brownian motion by spirits and sexual tension.

The ghost of sensual grace lingered there all the while enveloping the columns that held the balconies above me suspended in the burdened air. The shadows of those pillars, hence, resembled the svelte figure of the Flamenco dancer that had infused so much presence into the then quiet plaza. The towering terrace above took me under its wing, shielded me from the unnatural light of street lamps, and muffled the sound of senseless murmurs. I extended a night-cloaked hand and hissed a call.

Once.

Twice.

Thrice.

The hive replied with a buzz. The door gave way to cautiously curious fingertips. Within, a stony staircase rose like smoke, ethereal rock. Step by step, the stairs breathed me upwards to the light, like a moth. Out it streamed from the threshold, solidifying not only the stairwell but also the sense of music. The warm, textured sounds slid along the walls and floor, perspiring into my shoes. Like grit it was, hot sand stinging my feet, giving me agony for each instant stood still, bound by boots of Spanish leather.

I strode through, past the oaken door, past mirrors and fedoras, past Gauchos and Catalanes. I stepped into the royal chamber, where the Tangueros moved and spoke the tongue of turning bodies, shaking to the Milonga's beat like bees. The tiled floor, whose flowery regularity scented each tread taken, extended but a handful feet in each direction. A box of sardines where a dozen couples slid like fish past one another and past an impromptu audience waiting for their turn to enter the play.

I lost little time, instead losing myself in the communal embrace, letting the pleasantly poisoned music sting deep into my ear.

Tacit dancer

Her dark figure grew from the ground up, a shade liberated from the confines of surface. Her stance was a silent dance, motionless, yet stating intent, a stifled shout: "Flamenco!" Her face was aged, yet of timeless beauty:

Half moon eyes - the inverse smiles of samurai masks. The slender, sharp nose sliced the air she breathed, a blade hung over her fine mouth, wide and stern guarding a voice deep and sensuous, of musky tones, textured like white birch bark. Her hair, knotted into a tense bun, more than embraced her scalp, nigh permeating it even, the black ink of an epopee twisted and condensed beyond sense.

What darker threads of thought hid beneath? I imagined their ebony silk boil into sung voice as passion burnt them, leaving only the ash of memory. She did not rummage through the pale flakes of feeling, but instead tamed desire by becoming more obscure than its object, unfathomable to temptation and fate.

As dark stars absorb all light about themselves, so she had drained the light of day to herself, leaving the rest of the square in darkness to my eyes. Only later did I take notice of her escort, a man of ample chest and weathered, rocky face. His apparent prowess was tempered by his meek demeanour, such that side by side the two companions appeared disparate yet inexorably bound: like the King and Queen of a graceful chess set, like Lord and Lady Macbeth, like Mathieu and Conchita...

Duende Gallego

Trace now a curve, round the peak of O Cebreiro, the passageway into Gaelic Spain, as yet near free from the sully of our faithless hearts, the defunctness of folklore. Its spirits troubled and trickster fays know not our harsh morals but squeeze between our laws as light through alabaster, with mellow mood and gentle gait. This domain of thin fleshed sprites is said to be guarded by Cerberus, whose six great eyes wander the hills each eve as ignes fatui. The wind is wrought by his wild breath, exasperated as he shakes us, but fleas to him, rippling the treetops.

Only the vivid paints of the landscape brand the permeant lust. Immortal green, vehement violet and ardent cerulean, the passions pressed, egressing from these ethereal channels saturate our carnate world with what the gitanos call "duende", goblin or ghost. This force manifests too in contours we too can comprehend, but rarely see. Bearded gnomes buried in forest bulwarks shouldering your path, their rooted beards palpating the air, seeking your sudor. Dead, crusted trolls amidst the countless broken trees and crumpled leaves idling about, but his right arm reared, its hand vacant, more than empty, hollow, a porthole through his palm voiding our vision. Rustling, restless hobgoblins hiding in the bushes revert to the verd guise of great lizards, which as quickly turn to air. Smell it now. You'll catch the scent of burning hair, the self-styled torches of minute elves, baits for the giant moths they gallop, the flame a carrot, the shaft a cane. Listen to yours as it hits the ground, its echoes tell of tunnels running deep beneath, harbouring impish armies feeding on sulphur and lime, but field mice too and pilgrim rods when these abound.

Each year they grow extinct, as their ambient is divested. Just as we fall as flies without our oxygen, they cannot breathe an air that has no silence, absence of speech for its own sake. We're used to give quiet to the dead, but we should give it also to the living. Indeed, it is their gift to us, for without stillness we've no soul.

Enanos de viña

Take a map of the Iberian peninsula and trace a line between Pamplona and Burgos. Along that trace you shall find a vinery entrenched upon a modest hill, flaunting a militant, ruined manse, surrounded by silent troops camouflaging their tanned skins in green garbs, their veins prominent and virid. Hush is all there is to hear.

Legend tells these planted folk were not always rooted thus, though the barky commands of their master kept them nigh and fast in place. It was from the tenebrous eyes of the house that he blustered his vociferations at his then slaves in blood and serfs in law, a rather extended family beaten and pressed into thralldom. These his "children" were each hardened more by the relentless leather of his many belts, each one tardily eroding with their sweat the sturdy hide, than by their crushing labour. It was their yells that fecundated the soil each day and night, concocting the sorely delicious grapes that erupted as bodied fireworks into the clusters hanging from their sinewy gallows.

For three handful years the residence drew wealth from their spirited wines, whose taste was sought out by ecclesiasts and nobility, who sought to drink a grape that matched, severally, their habit and blood in quality and colour both. But as the lord aged, his grasp grew weaker, and thus his seal softened, started melting as did the flesh under his skin. As all tyrants, he was disposed of subtly and shamefully, rather than by much deserved violence, by daily doses of arsenic into his chalice, one stone of it in hefty weight across some years that did not show decay until his demise. Indeed they say the poison restored his strength and shifted his aspect from great proud villain to a crooked dwarf, hardening from the innards out; his tongue turned a plank, insensitive to the ratsbane delivered to him in ever greater portions. Die he did at last, at the dinner table, choking on the clumped solute clotting his throat, but not before he gargled through a curse, as Spaniards do, to each relative thrice removed.

Removed they were that eve, before supper, afore they had even time to take his corpse from the table, though try they did. Yet he was grounded in his place, his feet bound to the floor, his hands clutching the woody legs at the table's head, and his own caput twisted over the back of his oaken throne. Their slaver dead, they fell prey to custom instead - without fail, to work the field until the fall of dusk - and when a storm contorted the sky's brow and pushed forth its million tears, they did not take refuge within their quarters, but laboured on until their knees sank deep in mud, as did their hands. Not one emerged, nor knew the house again. 'Tis said the master now eats alone.

El Castillo de Belorado

Travelling the Way of St. James, I happened upon the quiet town of Belorado, in the province of Burgos. Many would say "large village" is more accurate a term, at least those pilgrims who would not venture outside its modern self, but would stay either in the comfort of their pilgrim "albergue", or limit themselves to visiting the modest central plaza nearby. They would not notice the past, espying them from the hills...

It had been a lucky chance that Elys and I decided, at the end of our long walk, to stay in the first place we found - a parish hostel in the church of Santa María, facing a small channel and almost succeeding in hiding the cliffs and caves set within the hill behind the edifice. Planted upon this hill, almost hidden from sight, sat a small rocky formation that I later found out to have been a castle. This "castle" seemed, from the distance, to be as uncivilized as the nearby caves, and made me wonder if the cliffs themselves had not belonged, at another time, to a refuge or even part of a citadel, perhaps now buried, composing its own grave mound.

Not long after hearing the word "castillo" - mentioned by the albergue's "hospitalera" - I already was striding up the grassy hill leading to the castle ruins. Although Elys had meant to accompany me until the end, when the drizzle turned to torrent she had to stop, since her garb was not well suited for a climb under the weather. "Turn back if you feel in danger" she said, "I will, my Love" I said, turning to her.

Yet slowly, as I climbed the slippery slope, as my clothes and shoes slowly soaked, and as I grew more determined to reach the castle - mockingly invisible from the slope - I started feeling that I could not turn back. Strangely, the wind and rain, which slowly gained vigour as they flew into my face, somehow pulled me forward. Even that brute gust of wind, which menaced to throw me off the path as it caught me unawares spying the ruins for the first time since I set off towards them, even that almost blazing downpour, they pulled my spirit in while thrusting my body away, perhaps in a vain attempt to separate them. These short episodes of inclement rage repeated many times, always when I found myself struggling to secure a foothold on the muddy path, always when the slope was steep, always when the castle grazed my mind.

I finally reached the small plateau where the small ruin stood. How to describe it without disappointing the reader? It is impossible to capture in words or photograph the actual spirit of the thing, which is not kin with its outer aspect. The ruin, which did not surpass a small house in size and rather seemed a natural rock untouched by chisel, bloated out of the hill, the cave at its foundation swollen like a bubble. It is to this cave that the zephyr called me, to its low, wide entrance, giving passage to a rough interior that would not have admitted me but on my hands and knees. It looked not as abandoned as I expected - the rests of wood and sharp rock within, and the rests of what could have been burnt or aged fabric suggested it had been visited, although I suspected no human being would find lasting comfort within the cavern. I stood at the threshold, with the wind pushing me within, but did not enter. How could I know whether that unnatural gust, which seemed to gain strength as I approached the castle, would let me out once I had entered its domain? As I stepped back, another gust of wind hit me, as in a last desperate attempt to bend my will, but another step back curbed it.

But I had not reached my destination, not yet. This thought appeared to have conjured a tempting path going up and round the ruin, to the rough facade towering above. I fell into its sin. As I stepped onto it, the squall renewed itself, alluring me on and forcing me to keep vigil on my steps.

When I looked up, I saw the facade from the other side, and for the first time I witnessed something distinctly human in it. It was not the fact that its arches and windows, unseen from the other side, seemed carved by iron rather than the elements. It was something entirely unexpected: I saw two 'faces' in the wall of the facade. The eyes of the rightmost, masculine face had large arches as its eyes topped by two short, grassy brows, and hiding the remaining features below under a dense beard twisted from various plants, grasses and mosses. The leftmost one, more feminine, had two small windows for eyes, each set within the curved brows of an arch, under which little grass could be seen, and where protrusions and cavities suggested the remaining features. Between the two, a bush of white flowers stood, perhaps as a last marker of the death and life of these once lords, once lovers, perhaps once slaves to one another. Why did their lives, which seemed turbulent enough to leave a mark in stone, result in small, clean, white blooms? While the windowless blind eyes of the stone lord could show me nothing, I thought that the eyes of his mistress could perhaps tell me something - if I could climb the wall and reach those high windows, perhaps I could see another world through them.

I checked myself. Those windows were not meant for human eyes.

I twisted myself round at last, finally heeding Elys' voice within me - "Turn back..." I ran down the path to the front of the castle, for the first time feeling how soaked my shoes had become, but as I stepped down onto the plateau I realised I could not find the path by which I had climbed onto it. Instead, the only path in sight veered off elsewhere, in the direction of the caved cliffs. Maybe the storm, with its rising vigour, had shifted the paths on the hill; if I had satisfied my wish to glance within the windows of that stone mistress, I would perhaps have found all paths gone, and myself alone on a dancing green island, eventually to be transmuted into one of its flower bushes...

I hurried down the path, and ignored the rain on my body, which had already passed through my raincoat as though through paper. It did not matter, not as long I could find a path - down, down, down... But the path mocked me, moved this way and than, first down, then up, yet higher than I had been before. Thankfully, I was not derided for long, and soon glimpsed the ruins of some houses down the hill, which I quickly passed only to realise that I was on the other side of the town. As I walked - or rather swam within my shoes - down the street to the parish hostel, all that existed was the cold wetness of that strange storm, reminding me that I had returned to reality.