Castles In Spain—and Bagpipes, Too

The drum rolled again, the whistle blew, and the two of us started walking. At least, all I had to do was to try to keep still. We walked through the square, down a fairly long street and then the drum beat again, the cap de colla waved and the man under me stopped walking. Just above my head a window opened. "It's the boy," shouted the cap. "Don't look up. Keep still. He's going to climb down on top of you." "Brace your shoulders," cried Ignacio. I braced my shoulders and waited. It seemed a very long time, and then I felt him coming down on my shoulders. The drum beat, and I started swaying. Hands pressed forward, but it was no good.

I woke up in my hotel room. Ignacio was leaning over me. "What happened?" I asked. "Nothing much," said Ignacio. "Just a few cuts and one or two bruises. You went through a plate-glass window. I've brought the bill with me. The whole art of the game is knowing how to fall."

I have never heard of a student of bagpipes, but I suppose such a thing exists, since nearly everybody is a student of something. When I arrived in Galicia I was very surprised to discover that bagpipes formed the greater part of the national music, and decided, with the help of wine, aguardiente, brandy, anis and extraordinarily cheap champagne cocktails, to make a study of them. The flower of bagpipe time is during the Feast of the Apostle in Santiago de Compostela, when groups of players accompanied by a man with a tiny drum march through the streets playing tamed Celtic airs. They are dressed in breeches, red stockings, and flutter with ribbons, the great gourd of their pipes slung over their shoulders like a haunch of venison. But it is a sad procession, unwitnessed and unloved, like a robin singing in a cemetery. The people of Santiago are praying or drinking, their great red-haired gods sulking in the mists of the mountains, and nobody gives a damn.

I hadn't been long in Santiago before I met Jonathan Speed. He was a plump man with faraway belligerent eyes who had come to Galicia to study cathedrals. But it was obvious that he was in search of something else, a private phantom, a strange unedited solution.

One day we heard some bagpipes. They were as wild as wind in the heather, stark with the naked cries of happy murderers in the glens, as Scotch as haggis or as Irish as promises. "Astounding," said Speed. "To hell with cathedrals and progressive jazz. Let us buy bagpipes."

Somebody told us about a master bagpipe manufacturer called Pablo. He made the bagpipes in front of your very eyes as another man makes hats or cigars. And when he had fluted the bagpipes he put the pipe to his lips and Pan blazed in the shop. Pan, and no other. Wonderful, insuperable, lost Pan. "The very thing," said Speed, and we went to the shop with one of those eternal Spanish friends who hunt for you everything from sardines to saints. There, in a lost street, crumpled with children, we entered a shop sweet with new sharpened wood, the hum of a lathe and the royal red blaze of the bagpipe blowers.

"Make me a bagpipe," said Speed.

"And me a bagpipe without the bag," I said.

In half an hour the bagpipes were on the counter and in another quarter of an hour I had a pipe as gay as a tinker's donkey. Speed slung the bag over his shoulder, blew on the pipe, there was a roar like a stuck pig, and a tune came out as brave as a field in May. It was a Northumbrian air, but it made no difference. I blew on my pipe and there was nothing but the wind. "Dance," said Speed, so I danced a vague Hibernian dance, and the children scuttled into the shop and Pablo himself raised the fluted pipe to his mouth and the sawdust room was a world of glowworms. Later we went from feast to feast until one day he suddenly put on a black suit and a Homburg hat and left for England. "My work," he said. Poetry or progressive jazz or cathedrals? I didn't ask him. I am English, but I don't understand the English.

I was alone with the pipe. I started to blow it in my small hotel high up above the Civil Guards, the commercial travellers, the pigs and the hens and the bells. I blew and I blew and not a note came out, just a sound like wind in the wainscoting, like old men coughing over their pipes in a ruined dormitory. I packed up, paid my hotel bill and left for the village of Ribeira at the end of a bay and went up into the hills. "Look out for wolves, eagles and ghosts," said an old female domestic, who occasionally threw a bucket of water into the Stone Age latrine. She told me about an eagle which had killed an elderly councilor in the town hall. "It sat outside the window and stared at him," she said. "He died of fright." They came from Portugal and might be dead relatives.