Read Online A Year in the World by Frances Mayes - Free Book Online

quince with cheeses, fig biscuits with walnut sauce. And late, late flamenco. One venue featured a young male dancer full of passion and precision. I was intrigued by his guitarist singer, whose involvement with the dancer seemed almost to make the dance possible. He strained toward the dancer, intently watched, egged him on, pushed his own energy into the dancer. The performance began with a piercing cry, “Aaiiee . . . ,” a skull-ringing wail that might have originated with Jewish rituals, for the flamenco weaves the traditions of Gypsies, Muslims, and Jews, bringing their sorrow and passion to indigenous folk music.
    I love the moment when the dance suddenly stops and the dancer walks off, as casually as though the light turns and he crosses the street. Snap. The mood is broken. That dramatic shift signifies the difference between the
duende
of the dance and the normal world where we reveal little of what we feel. We like the new phrases we’re learning—
toque de palmas
, clapping,
pitos
, finger snapping,
taconeo
, heel stamping. All contribute to the body as instrument.
Castañuelas
comes from
chestnuts
, and perhaps the first castanets were improvised from two dried ones. Ed buys the CD to take home, perhaps to listen to while we cook, so far away from this courtyard open to the stars. “Do you feel that by experiencing flamenco, another room in your mind has opened?” I ask.
    “I had a pretty stereotyped impression before. Now we’ll be listening to the music, recalling the faces, the passion. Rip-roaring passion.”
    “Good flamenco tours are sellouts all over the world. Did you know that there are three hundred flamenco schools in Japan? Japan! The center of decorum! What explains the rise in popularity of flamenco, here and everywhere?”
    “A yearning. This art touches a yearning we have. The unspoken longings way inside the heart,” Ed says.
    What man can travel this long road and not fill up his soul with crazy arabesques?
     
    The day arrives when we are to leave, though we are not going far. We will go to a hacienda in the country where they raise bulls and horses. Sevilla falls away quickly, and we are buzzing in our small rented car toward the
vega
, the plain. Although I never thought so with Las Vegas, the word carries a charge.
Vega
—we begin to experience it as we drive out of Sevilla and the big sky opens over the slightly rolling fields, some with olive trees, some planted with crops, some left to the bulls. My imagined house in Sevilla quickly reabsorbs into a fantasy of a country hacienda, a
cortijo
. We pass them every few miles, stark white, walled, big trees, paradises on their own out in the country.
    We check into the Cortijo El Esparragal, three thousand hectares forming a private world with the courtyard as the center of it. A cloister furnished with carved wooden chairs and benches surrounds the arched courtyard with fountain and potted plants. The walls are covered in bull heads and bridles, as in a Florida restaurant where sailfish and marlin hang above the tables. One bull has a bloody tongue and a sword in his back. This is so like the gory religious imagery I found shocking in the Prado. Out in the fields horses play, running from one fence to the opposite. Your heart has to somersault when you see these handsome animals run, turn with a neigh, and race full tilt in the other direction.
    We are the only guests, and it’s odd—we are in someone’s house. All of the family, the girl at the reception tells us, live in Madrid. We settle into our room on a small leafy courtyard. Ed cracks the window so the murmur of the fountain pours in the window. He’s soon out the door. The lure of the bull pasture, the long dirt roads to drive in silence, the big shady cork trees, the fragrance of ripe oranges, the private chapel, the miniature bullring—the intact
world
of this hacienda immediately seems compelling to us. I would like a bell tower on my house, and miles of