Passion in 6/8 time

Flash fiction

The painter was woken from hot, wine-soaked dreams by the sound of a guitar: the melody clearly carried through the heat of a summer evening in that brimming Andalusian town at the foot of the Sierra Nevada mountains.

He knew the tune well. It was a classic: Recuerdos de la Alhambra. It resonated in the French painter’s heart, stirring heady memories of his flaming days and torrid nights in Granada and other towns in the Spanish south. He spent his time painting the women and drinking the wine.

He listened intently as the guitar player’s deft fingers moved with languid yet assured facility up and down the fretboard, coaxing romance and passion from the six strings. The gypsy player possessed such a tremolo as would have made nightingales weep.

The painter slipped from the bed, his eyes shining. He left the shimmering young girl asleep, naked on sheets stained with passion and Rioja. He ran a finger lightly down the curve of her back which was glistening with sweat. She didn't wake up. He stopped at his easel for a moment and cocked a critical eye at the nude on the canvas. He said to himself, I will finish her later.

Francisco Tárrega and the gypsy’s achingly beautiful tremolo held him in thrall now. He grabbed a piece of charcoal, his sketchbook and stepped out onto the balcony. He shaded his eyes with his right hand and peered down into the dusty golden light.

In the shadow of a doorway on the opposite side of the street sat a middle-aged gypsy playing a Spanish guitar. He was a true virtuoso of the frets. His fingers were strong, supple and slender. Crisp rasgueado, haunting tremolo… Such precision and tone! The gypsy played with the consummate mastery and feeling of a concert hall musician, yet his stage was nothing but a dusty old step in one of Granada’s back streets.

The guitarist finished the tune with a flourish. The painter clapped loudly and excessively from the balcony, crying, ‘Encore, Maestro! Encore!’ He strutted about like a cock and threw money.

Twenty euros floated down like a lazy bird and lay blue and still in the gutter in the airless evening. The gypsy regarded the note with interest but didn’t move to pick it up. Instead, he tipped his hat and grinned up at the painter, showing teeth that glowed like pearls, so white against the darkness of his mouth and his sunburnt face. He took a red rag from his shirt pocket and wiped his hands. Then, hunched like a brooding lover over his guitar, he resumed and played a piece by Carulli: bell-like chords and nimble arpeggios reverberated appassionata off the walls of the narrow street.

The painter’s drawing hand seemed to mimic the guitarist’s plucking hand; each moved harmoniously, languorously, lovingly, distilling the sum of their respective arts — one sketching on a white page and the other conjuring sublime vibrations into the ether.

After a minute or so of activity, in which his mouth was compressed in a thin line of concentration, the painter relaxed and studied the black lines of his sketch. The composition flared up vividly and appeared in his mind as it would be upon completion. He said to himself, ‘I shall paint, in cobalt and cadmium, flashing stars in his eyes, and capture in burnt ochre blurs the ballet of his fingers dancing across the fretboard. His dark orange guitar shall be a flaming sun in a god’s hands. The legend of the Gypsy Guitarist in Grenada. It will surely be a masterpiece. Perhaps, it will be displayed in the Prado one day.’

The painter returned to the cool shade of the room. Maria lingered, still wet on the canvas. She was unfinished but a few bold strokes would do for her. He smoked a strong cigarette – unfiltered Gitanes, papier maïs – and studied the contours of the dusky beauty on the bed, while listening to the passion bubbling up from the street below in 6/8 time.