Stella, 1982, Córdoba by Jonathan Hall

When asked in an interview about the key elements in her books, Dame Barbara Cartland, the ‘Queen of Romance,’ one of the best-selling authors of the twentieth century, answered: ‘People, time, and place. In equal measure.’ In equal measure.

Aged eighteen, with the whole spring and summer stretching ahead of me before I started university, I spontaneously decided to go to Córdoba, in Andalucía, southern Spain, a city I’d visited once before, on a school trip five years earlier, and it had bewitched me.

In those days, traveling to Córdoba meant spending forty hours on trains, with two changes: one in Paris and another, in the middle of the night, on the French-Spanish border. I could tell when we finally got into Andalucía, because the villages became whiter, and the castles that loomed over them became more and more honey coloured, rather than the grey of France and northern Spain. And then, suddenly, we were pulling into Córdoba. And I knew no one.

I didn’t realise it then—I’ve never been good at recognising trends and signs-of-the-time when I’m actually in them (I’m more a fish than a heron)—but Spain was in the throes of redefining itself, post Franco. While Britain had enjoyed the swinging sixties, then glam rock, disco, and punk in the seventies, Spain had been labouring under a forty-year dictatorship. But with the dictator recently dead, the Spanish were now vigorously shaking off the shackles; a social revolution—La Movida.

Yet it wasn’t the people I noticed most as I walked towards the city centre, it was the streets themselves—the cobbled, white-walled, winding streets. Every window seemed to have wrought iron bars, or geraniums, or both. The further I walked, the more details I noticed: the terracotta-tiled roofs with weeds growing out of them; the cables and wires twisted into ropes, slung from house to house, and painted over in white; the waffle-textured pavements; the small, neighbourhood squares, each with a statue, or a stone cross, or a fountain. And in every fountain seemed to bob a lemon or an orange from an overhanging tree.

The standard townhouse in Córdoba had massive wooden doors, studded with iron, that led directly off the street and opened onto small vestibules, usually furnished with a cot. Beyond that was a wrought-iron screen, a gate within it that led to a cool, dark, tiled patio decked out with potted plants, more geraniums. Sometimes, the patios had their own little central fountain, around which the residents could sit and chat. As I strolled past, I peeked in. As poets have noted, Córdoba is a city of glimpses. Eventually, I addressed an old man sitting on one of those cots in the doorway and thus discovered the Fonda Andrea (Andrea Inn).

The day I moved in was a mild spring day, but the day I left, many weeks later, it was forty-four degrees. I’d start my day early, buying El País newspaper before claiming a place in one of my favourite bars. My Spanish wasn’t really good enough to read and understand the whole paper, but I loved the ritual. I bought a satchel and a leather-bound notebook—Córdoba is famous for its leatherwork, so it seemed appropriate—and, once I’d finished reading the paper, I’d idly scribble down some random thoughts, poetic words and phrases, observations, germs of story ideas…

Then I’d wander the city for an hour or two, always hugging the shady side of the streets, like the locals. I might start by walking through the market in the Plaza de la Corredera, where dozens of stalls all sell the same cheap pants, bras, socks, and polyester clothes. There was one lady behind a trestle table selling scoops of herbal remedies out of open bags marked simply: Stomach, Intestines, Energy, Circulation of the Blood, etc. In one corner of the square, a sturdy, charismatic, no-nonsense gypsy woman manhandled a huge metal syringe to pipe curls of dough into a pan of boiling fat: churros. Once they were crisp and brown, she’d lift them out with a sieve, wrap them in a twist of paper, add cinnamon sugar, and sell them for a handful of pesetas. I’d often buy some, not only because they were delicious, but also because it allowed me to observe the dynamic of the gypsy family: the hulking men, with their long, greased hair and sideburns, their bellies hanging over their tight black trousers, a single boot resting on the footrail of the nearby bar, smoking and drinking, and pretending they weren’t at the beck and call of the impressive matriarch.

Walking around the streets I saw knife shops, and hat shops (I’d look in the window and wonder whether I could pull off a beret, or a traditional Cordobés flat cap), and shops exclusively selling flamenco dresses and outfits (I definitely couldn’t pull off a bolero jacket and sombrero), and shops exclusively selling fans, and shops exclusively selling religious ornaments and effigies and bibles.

Policewomen in boots and skirts, with carnation red lipstick, and cool sunglasses, directed traffic at the major intersections, looking more like henchwomen from Bond films than policewomen. Meanwhile, while the sexy policewomen dealt with the traffic, the policemen propped up bars like the gypsy men, café solos and shots of brandy in front of them, and pistols on their hips. And there were so many bars, almost all of them what, in England, we’d have called spit-and-sawdust: loud, floors littered with peanut shells, fag ends, and serviettes, with hanging hams and bullfighting posters. And, always, with flamenco playing from the sound systems.

Flamenco was everywhere. And it was thrilling to be surrounded by what felt like a live folk culture. What I didn’t know at the time (as I said: a fish, not a heron) is that at that time flamenco was enjoying a ‘moment.’ In the sixties and seventies, it had been part of Franco’s plan to portray a united Spain, with a single national culture, epitomised by flamenco and bullfighting. With Franco gone, flamenco had become a battleground between traditional and modern, between right and left, between old-fashioned (Franco-ist) flamenco and new-fangled flamenco, fused with rock, blues, and Latin.

When I say flamenco was everywhere, I mean everywhere: groups of kids leaving school would clap and sing flamenco on their walk home; every other fountain had a guitarist perched on it, strumming flamenco rhythms; a busker in the main square regularly attracted crowds by singing satirical flamenco songs about local politicians and celebrities; babies in prams mimicked the twirling flamenco hand movements that themselves, supposedly, mimicked the picking of imaginary olives.

I bought a cassette tape player—yup, we’re in 1980!—and listened during the siesta hours, at low volume, to easier-access, ‘new’ flamenco until, by the time I went out again in the evening, I was primed and ready for a night out. But, unfortunately, still with no one in particular to talk to.

Until one night…

In Córdoba, it was handy to be a smoker, so I was trying my hand at it. You couldn’t just approach a group of strangers and start to mingle, but you could always ask for a light, or even a cigarette: ‘¿Tienes tabaco?’ Or, if you were picky, or cheeky, you could even specify that you were looking for either blonde or black tobacco—rubio or negro. And, before you knew it, you were chatting. Anyway, that night I found myself sitting at a bar, eyeing up—not too creepily, I hope—a group of a dozen people at a table who looked a little older than me, mixed English and Spanish. I was summoning the courage to pull the cigarette trick and inveigle my way in when I noticed one of them, a girl, staring at a guy a little further along the bar from me: an older guy who was air guitaring to the Stephen Stills track LOVE THE ONE YOU’RE WITH that was playing through the bar’s speakers. He was being very discreet, lost in his own world, but looked very professional.

The girl staring from the group was way too lovely for me to attempt to cadge a cigarette, so, instead, I decided on a tangential approach, sidled up to the air-guitarist and commented that he looked like he played a pretty mean guitar (what did I know?!). He was modest and kind and American, and between us we fashioned a kind of conversation. Which is when I glanced up and saw the girl smirking at us. At me. She’d spotted my tangent.

I smiled back and, before I had time to think it through or back out, I walked over and introduced myself. Her name was Stella, and she and her crowd were English teachers having a night out with some of their adult students. And, as it turned out, she only smoked roll-ups (and only very occasionally), so the cigarette ruse would have failed anyway. I owe a lot to that air-guitarist, but I never saw him again. Dude, thank you. Hope you’re with the one you love and loving the one you’re with.

It didn’t take very long for me to fall in love. Maybe not that first night, nor maybe the next, but by the end of the week, I was lost in it. To be honest, it wasn’t just Stella I loved; I also loved her friends, their students, the places they went, the way they lived, their passion for Córdoba. I discovered that I not only loved Spain, speaking Spanish, and Córdoba, but also loved people who loved them.

Stella had flippy, light brown hair, which also had a bit of a tousle to it, and brown eyes behind round, metal-rimmed, John Lennon-style glasses. And she had a lovely, long neck, and she smelled good. Always. And she had a way of pursing her lips that made her seem knowing, and ever-so-slightly judgmental (remember that smirk she gave me that first night, which told me she’d seen through me?).

She was political, too. It was the eighties, Thatcher’s Britain and all that, so there was a lot of it about, but it wasn’t just party politics, it was sexual politics, too. She once told me that a book called THE PERFUMED GARDEN, a fifteenth-century work of erotic literature that she’d stumbled upon when she was twelve, had profoundly affected her. She called it a paean to women. I didn’t really understand any part of that sentence. She cooked and had a spice shelf, as well as a stained, old stove-top espresso maker, and kept various bottles of spirits in her kitchen. She played LPs (yup, LPs) by a Nigerian musician called Fela Kuti (cool out of 10: that was a 10). She knitted to relax (9/10 when she did it; 4/10 when anyone else did it). She made her own earrings (8/10). She had a lesbian tryst with one of the other teachers, just to see whether she liked it. ‘Women are so much softer than men!’ (For me, a 9/10, thought there’ll be men out there who’d give that an 11). She was the sort of person who made you want her approval. I still do.

She hadn’t had a straightforward home life; her parents were academics and distant, then, later in life, hoarders. After school, she’d studied English at Nottingham, then bookbinding at the London College of Printing (8/10), then, at night school, a course called Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL), an ingenious method of teaching English that didn’t require you to speak a single word of a foreign language. That’s how she’d ended up in Córdoba.

And she got Córdoba in exactly the same way that I got Córdoba. Maybe even more so. She was working there, after all. And she took her job seriously. In the evenings, she’d have to prepare lessons and, despite my most charming efforts, she couldn’t be distracted. So, while she prepared her lessons, I started writing a novel. This was pre-laptop days, so I was writing in longhand, which somehow made me feel like a more authentic writer. In truth, she was making a living, and I was still just pretending. Or maybe she was pretending, too. Maybe this golden time was all the more intense—maybe they often are—because we were both on the brink of real life. Teetering. Circling our arms so as not to overbalance and pitch forward.

Either way, at weekends, we cut loose and made the most out of the city and her friends. We didn’t have mobiles, of course, but we didn’t need them; we knew who’d be in which bar and when. We chose the bars we went to in order to have their specialty tapa: salmorejo at Pepe’s; tortillitas de camarón at the Burlaero; riñones al jerez at Rafaé. And at every stop we sipped ice-cold fino sherry, or ice-cold beer (still, at the time, a novelty in the UK). And at every bar, we’d meet another crowd and spend five minutes shaking hands and kissing everyone on both cheeks, and ordering more drinks and tapas. English teachers seemed to know everyone. We spoke English amongst ourselves, peppered with Spanish words and phrases, and the Spanish students were always happy to join in. Some of the teachers spoke good Spanish, learned at school and university, whereas Stella’s had all been learned right there in Córdoba, so she only ever spoke with a strong Cordobés accent—a kind of Spanish cockney, with lots of dropped consonants, particularly at the end of words, as if they’d simply run out of steam. Cordobeses loved Stella’s Spanish because it made her even more one of their own.

Most Saturday nights, we’d end up at a flamenco bar, watching our young friends Luisa and Juanito dance. Luisa was one of Stella’s students, and Juanito was a genuine gypsy—too untamed for the classroom. They danced for money, then, after their brilliant, formal performances, the evenings would end with a party. Stella, no expert herself, had managed to teach me the rudiments of the simplest flamenco dance, the sevillana: a flirty dance, always danced in pairs, and marked by simple, one-two-three clapping. Until the final moment, that is, when the clapping stops at two, catching out the uninitiated. Pah, tourists! In the dance, the man and woman insinuate themselves around each other without ever actually touching, and without looking directly at each other, until that final beat, when the man catches her around the waist and stares deep into her eyes.

By the end of the end of the night, Stella and I usually found ourselves alone, perched on some slab of worn, ancient stone outside the Mezquita, (the wonder, half-cathedral, half-mosque, that’s the heart and soul of the city) or on the brim of the fountain in the Plaza del Potro (the same one that Cervantes was reputed to have sat on), or sitting on the ground, our backs against one of the buttresses of the Roman walls that surround the old city. We’d sit there, metaphorically breathless, talking about big things, until, at three in the morning, the street cleaners turned the corner, hosing down the cobbles. They had a job to do, and they’d seen it all before: fights, love, sex…You didn’t mess with them.

At the end of the summer, my departure date snuck up on me. I’d bought a return ticket all those weeks ago and forgotten about it. On my last Saturday night out, a group of musicians in the bar struck up a sevillana called El Adiós, which contains the lines:

No te vayas todavía, no te vayas, por favor

No te vayas todavía

Hasta la guitarra mía llora cuando dice adiós

Don’t go yet

Please don’t go

Until my guitar weeps as it says goodbye

Stella mouthed the words to me across the table. I didn’t know it then, but she could have been singing for both of us about those golden months. I did come back a few weeks later, and I came and went a few more times over the next few months, but whatever it was between us was no longer what it had been. Our guitars had wept goodbye.

In the years afterwards, Stella got married and divorced and now lives in Margate, Kent (8/10). She has a daughter—not mine!—named Poppy, who sounds just as smart and fascinating and cool as her mum (so that’s a 10 + 10 = 20). And we’re still friends.

As I write these lines, all these years later, I’m in Córdoba again, revisiting. And this time I’ve been having text, photo, and video exchanges with Stella back in the UK (videos at the touch of a mobile phone button! We couldn’t even have imagined such a thing). She asked if I was loving it or hating it. ‘Both’ was the only answer I could give. Bittersweet, as nostalgia always is. Ah, but back in the day…