Guadix is a windy, dusty town on the slopes of the dry side of the massive ridge that is the Sierra Nevada in Andalusia, Spain. These slopes are the rain-shadow badlands of the province of Granada: a place few foreign tourists visit. The other side of the mountain, the Mediterranean side, is called the Alpujarra and seems a world away: verdant, flowery slopes with orchards, pastures and little whitewashed villages clinging to them: a landscape and people made famous by the English travel writer Gerald Brenan, who lived there.
Our music was not saying anything to these birds, any more than their chirruping said anything to us
But our side could not be more different. I say “our” because my partner and I own two cave houses in Guadix, and often stay. We love the town, partly for its workaday ordinariness; but it’s not without history (going back to Roman times), civic pride, a scatter of fine buildings and a lively cultural life.
Last Friday we saw an early evening concert advertised: a Brahms sonata for piano and clarinet, and a piano quintet by Dvorak. We decided to go. The young musicians were local, and the venue was a beautiful salon on the upper floor of the ancient building that serves the town’s college of music. The flyer called the concert “Evocaciones.” For me, that title said more than it can have known.
The concert started at 8 p.m. It was a warm evening, and I was by a big window. To my left was the salon, the musicians, instruments, and an audience of about fifty people beneath a lofty, beautifully carved ceiling. To my right, beneath the window, was a little square.
It would be only a slight exaggeration to say that in this, the last hour of daylight, the sky was dark with thousands of swifts, just arrived over the mountains from Africa. They winged around the square and past my window, amazingly never hitting it or crashing into each other, calling with continual high-pitched chirrups on a single note. No ornithologist, I’ve no idea what they were achieving by this frenzied behavior, but round and round they went, wheeling, diving, cheeping and climbing, at tremendous — almost sickening — velocity. Were they feeding? Was this mating behavior? Were they simply in high spirits, celebrating landfall after the Sahara and the ocean? Perhaps they were snapping up insects, but this looked more like a party than a hunt. These birds were very, very excited. By what I could not tell.
Within, the concert had begun: the Brahms sonata, opus 120, first. A young lady, Pilar García Cifo, played the clarinet with accuracy and grace. On the piano Pedro José Gavilán Guirao led with assurance. The audience were rapt, remaining so throughout. Within that salon we were — audience and musicians — in a world of our own, with a focus of our own: the music. We could hear the swifts but had screened out their music – except perhaps for me, right by the window.
And could these birds hear our music? Theoretically, yes, loud and clear; but how were they hearing it — which is tantamount really to asking what they were hearing? Not the music we were listening to. They were hearing (and probably screening out) a kind of strange noise. The clarinet is not known in swift-world, and these sequences of notes would not, to them, carry the familiarity with shape and form, the evocation of musical pleasure, the meaning, on which a European composer can rely in his audience.
Our music was not saying anything to these birds, any more than their chirruping said anything to us. Only in one sense could we hear each other; in another not at all.
And now, outside, a new event. A heavy portable plinth on which stood a decorated Christian cross was making its way across the square, carried at shoulder height by the Catholic faithful.
I’ve since done a little elementary research into this, but cannot say I’m much the wiser as to its meaning. After Easter, it seems that in Andalusia, and particularly in the Granada region, May 3 marks what’s called the Festival of the Cross; and during the preceding weekend mobile crosses are made, lavishly decorated and carried around the towns on their plinths, the culmination being the festival itself. The cross proceeding beneath my window was one we had seen stationary in Guadix’s main plaza, with many gathered around while a band played. Now (I suppose) it was being walked through the town to reach a wider audience. Apparently it makes numerous appearances, quickening the drumbeat of religious excitement (as it were), in the days leading up to the festival.
All of which is packed with meaning for those I saw following the cross through the square beneath me, but meant nothing at all to me or the swifts above. The birds and I must be counted as witnesses to this performance without really seeing it — because we were unable to share the feelings of those involved or the people watching them. The ritual was undoubtedly saying something but, oblivious to its meaning, the swifts and I could not hear it.
The birds, the music concert and the followers of the cross were at this moment coinciding: same time, same place; yet in three different worlds, conscious of each other only in the most primitive sense, but not hearing the same thing, not seeing the same thing. There was no shared meaning.
The graphic artist M.C. Escher became famous during my college days for his mathematically inspired pictures of logical impossibilities, such as hands drawing themselves. But the one I loved best depicts water on whose surface flat leaves float in two dimensions, in whose reflection we can see trees and sky, above and beneath whose surface a fish, blind to what’s above, swims. Escher called it “Three Worlds” (1955). This drawing is not of an impossibility, but a reality. Or rather three realities, each blind, deaf, dumb to the other’s meaning. For me at the concert in Guadix, “evocations” was the right word.
This article was originally published in The Spectator’s UK magazine. Subscribe to the World edition here.
