I’d come to Spain to study flamenco, and if I couldn’t do that, what was the point in carrying on? But how could I go back to Australia so soon? Was I going to head home after just two months, slip in the back door, and hope nobody noticed me? And when people asked, “Hey, aren’t you supposed to be living your dream in Spain?” I’d have to look confused and say, “Spain? Oh right! Spain. Yeah, about that…”
I hadn’t come all this way to just give up. After all I’d been through—my first nights in the old elevator shaft, shivering under the blankets at Miguel’s house, those morning train rides, jetés in Jiffies, bursting into tears at the price of towels—was it really going to end like this?
I didn’t feel like going back to the apartment, so I wandered, looking for a place to sit for a while. There aren’t many parks in Madrid, just busy roads lined with sad, struggling trees that look like the celery you find at the bottom of the crisper when you’re cleaning out the fridge, so I stepped into an old stone church. At least I could sit there without having to pay the price of a cup of coffee. I slid into a pew in the darkest corner and sighed.
There were a few people seated in the other pews, and soon two priests came out through the old wooden doors to the side of the altar and started to set up for mass. This was usually my cue to leave, but I wasn’t ready to face the world just yet. So I stayed there in my dark corner, hidden behind a wide stone column. And when the service started, the droning monotonous voice of the Spanish priests didn’t interrupt my train of thought. The church was steadily filling up with people, and every few minutes or so they would all stand up and mumble something inaudible in Spanish, then sit back down again. But hidden in my corner, I could just sit and stare into space.
I thought about calling my parents, but how could I ask them for money? If they gave it to me, it would probably come with the proviso that I get on a plane back home and into a university course.
In front of me there was a painted statue of a woman in a fabulous flowing gown. She was very beautiful in a silent movie kind of way. Her long auburn hair was arranged in perfect ringlets and her impeccably painted eyebrows were drawn together in an expression of intense emotion. Was it anguish or ecstasy? I remembered reading somewhere once that the difference between the saints and us regular people is that the saints have already seen the happy ending to the story. Perhaps that was what she was looking at. I wished that I could see mine.
The priests stepped down off the altar swinging gold incense burners. How theatrical, I thought, and remembered the incense during Semana Santa in Seville. Maybe I should go back there…
Just then, a flamenco guitar began to play. The congregation rose to their feet, and this time I joined them, looking out from behind the column to see where the music was coming from.
A flamenco guitarist was standing at the altar. His head was bowed as he plucked the strings of the guitar. Then he lifted his head and sang to Mary. There were actually five priests at the altar, I saw. They stood with reverently bowed heads listening to the flamenco singer.
And then, as if on cue, the entire congregation sang out with the guitarist the chorus of the song:
Cheer up, Mary.
Don’t look so sad, Mary.
Why won’t you smile, Mary?
Even the priests had raised their heads and were singing along.
Flamenco-singing priests? Is this what the Spanish do in mass? Every time I’d come into the church, I’d always left before they got started, so I never knew that I was missing the toma que toma. And I remembered the tear-streaked face of the old man in the crowded street in Seville during Semana Santa who had told me that Jesus was dancing.
Only in Spain.
Only in Spain could a bloodied and tortured Jesus dance a bulería while nailed to a cross. Only in Spain could a congregation sing and clap their hands and tell the Virgin Mary it’s not so bad after all.
After the mass I walked back home through the flea market. I passed the old men who sat every day out front of their stores in the sun, clapping compás to the flamenco music on the radio. I stepped around old lace fans and castanets and faded postcards of flamenco dancers that were laid out on display on the footpath. It occurred to me that every day I was surrounded by flamenco. I hurried past it every morning on my way to work, and it was always there to greet me as I made my way home. I even had to step over it on the pavement.
I reminded myself of why I had come to Spain. I’d come to live a passionate life. I’d wanted to feel and smell and taste life, and live like that dancer on the stage in Seville, risking that triple turn, never sure she wouldn’t spin right off the stage. I’d come because I wanted to learn to live with toma que toma, and it seemed that in Spain this was one lesson I couldn’t avoid. Even during my darkest night of the soul, when I wanted to sink into the oblivion of self-pity, I’d found myself at the back of a church in the middle of a musical number.
When I reached Mariela’s building, I could hear the sound of salsa music coming from the second-floor window. I knew what that meant: the couch had been pushed back and there would be a calimocho waiting for me. I could use one. I didn’t know when I’d be able to afford to go back to dance classes, and I was going to have to take a break until I saved up some money. But there’s no time for feeling sorry for yourself in this country. Not even Mary could get away with that.
• • •
That night I was woken by the sound of someone singing flamenco. A lone, high voice, it sounded like that of a child. I sat up in bed and leaned across to the window, pulling back the curtains.
A group of teenage boys were walking up the street. They were slim and wore suit jackets and collared shirts. The group clapped compás as one boy sang flamenco. I poked my head out the window and watched as they passed beneath the yellow light of the street lamps. The boy threw back his head and belted out his song to the night sky.
“Olé…” one of the group said.
They continued down the street, and their voices faded and were replaced by the sound of traffic.
I lay back against the pillow and asked myself: Were they…gypsies?
The boy who had been singing sounded like a gypsy. He had that same high yet raspy voice I was used to hearing on my flamenco CDs. And really, wouldn’t you have to be a gypsy to be walking the streets at night singing flamenco?
I lay in bed hoping to hear them come back down the street, but they didn’t. Perhaps they were gypsies, I thought as I eventually drifted off to sleep. I wonder if they’ll let me run away with them…
THE GYPSIES
Or
Good-for-nothin’, gun-totin’, bulerías-dancin’, polka-dot-wearin’…
I’m one of those people who like to follow the news. Even if it really makes no observable difference to my life how the recent elections in Afghanistan went, or who leaked that embarrassing email to the press back home, I still like to feel informed. But in Spain my news consumption was haphazard at best. I no longer had Radio National to play in the mornings as I did my makeup, and the Latinas didn’t have Internet for me to access the English-language press. But now I was glad of that. I wanted to disconnect from the world I had come from and be absorbed into Spanish culture.
So instead I got my info fix from the Spanish TV news that I saw in the cafés where I’d linger between classes. And Spanish news was nothing like the Australian news. Spanish news was full of gypsies. Every day there seemed to be a gypsy story, whether it was an interview with a dark-eyed flamenco artist about their new album or an exposé on life in gypsy ghettos. I would forget my café con leche and stare up at the TV in fascination. Each glimpse into the world of the gypsies was like another piece of the puzzle I was putting together in my head.
But the gypsy stories weren’t like regular news stories. There was always an element of crazy to them. Like the article I read in a paper someone had left behind on the train about a
child wedding in a gypsy compound that was broken up by the police. Apparently thirteen was marrying age in gypsyland, and the gypsies were furious that the Spanish authorities would dare to interfere with their customs.
Then one of my favorite flamenco singers, El Capullo de Jerez, hit the headlines when he was accused of pouring gasoline over the child of a man who owed him money and threatening to set him on fire. You’d think that kind of negative publicity would put me off, but it didn’t. Because for every story I heard about those troublesome gypsies, I’d hear another person say that only the gypsies danced real flamenco. Of course, if flamenco is, in its essence, pure drama and pure passion, there was no one more dramatic or more passionate than the Spanish gypsies.
I asked my English student Andrés about them. “Gypsies? Bwarf! Where I come from, we say everyone south of Vittoria is a gypsy!” Vittoria is a town near the southern border of the Basque Country. Andrés told me the best way to see gypsy flamenco was to go to a gypsy wedding. Yes, of course—I had to go to a gypsy wedding! But when I asked him how I could get an invite, he just shrugged and said, “Don’t ask me, you are the girl from Seville. When you finish with the gypsies, come to Bilbao and I can introduce you to ETA, eh? If you want some more danger!” ETA was the Basque terrorist group who were fighting for independence from Spain.
I asked my other students about gypsies, and from all of them I got the same reaction: “Why do you want to know about the gypsies?” Each one of my students told me the same thing: that the gypsies are nothing but no-good, lying, cheating, gun-toting, knife-wielding, drug-dealing, pimping rascals. Or variations on that theme.
My class at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs went into an uproar when I asked them about the gypsies. They told me that the gypsies used to live in slums in the center of Madrid; then, in an effort to gentrify the area, the government had relocated them to nice new apartments outside the city. The gypsies, my class told me, had gone in and ripped up the carpets, pulled out the air-conditioning units, and sold off all the appliances. They even kept goats, donkeys, and chickens inside the apartments. That I found hard to believe.
I didn’t know what to think of all this information. Were the gypsies born artists and the creators and guardians of flamenco, or were they dangerous parasites to be avoided at all costs? Or were they both? Were they gun-toting, knife-wielding, polka-dot–wearing, bulerías-dancing, compás-clapping rogues? If so, I wanted to meet one. Maybe I could become a bulerías-dancing roguette, I thought, with a polka-dot scarf around my neck and a knife in my garter. I’d live by night to the sound of compás and the clicking fingers and tapping feet of the gypsy boys.
• • •
The gypsy boys…those same boys passed underneath my window every night. I could hear the sound of their hands clapping as they approached, and the clear, heartbreaking voices of the young singers. I started to recognize the same boys in the streets around El Rastro. Aged between thirteen and twenty, they dressed like mini Frank Sinatras in suit jackets over jeans, and they always wore sunglasses, even at night.
When I went out in the evening, I’d pass them on the street. Sometimes as I walked past they would be singing and clapping while one of the group danced flamenco. I’d slow down and watch the kids’ thin leather shoes dancing on the street and be amazed by how casually they performed steps as complicated as the ones I sweated over in class.
I wished that I could stop and talk to them and get them to teach me to dance the way they did, but the boys never took any notice of me, even when I deliberately circled the block to walk past them two or three times. They were too taken up in their songs to see that I was walking slowly past them, longing to be included in their group. And the fact that they were too busy singing and dancing to see me just made me all the more determined to find a way in.
But how was I going to get into the underground world of gypsy flamenco? My students at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs told me that the gypsies didn’t mix with nongypsies. They had communities in Madrid, right in the city, but they still lived according to their own code. They didn’t have regular jobs or send their children to school; instead they lived off social benefits and what they made trapicheando. That was a new word for me. Antonio wrote it up on the whiteboard and tried to explain its meaning. “They are buying and selling things. Making deals…”
“Like wheeling and dealing?” I suggested. It was the best English equivalent I could come up with. I asked what they dealt in, and the group threw out different examples: gold, weapons, drugs, women.
That evening on my way home from work, I walked down to the corner where I’d seen the gypsy boys dancing that morning. They weren’t there, so I walked through the backstreets looking for them, listening for the sound of palmas or flamenco singing. I was aware of the fact that I had become a gypsy stalker, but I didn’t care. I was a girl on a mission, and my mission was to run away with the gypsies. First, I just had to find them…
I turned a corner, and the street opened out into a square that was full of gypsies. The whole family was out. The old men stood together smoking cigars, their bushy sideburns almost reaching the crisp collars of their shirts. Their wives stood in a group, all dressed in black apart from their heavy gold jewelry and bright lipstick. And in the center under the trees the young gypsies were gathered in a circle around a guitarist who played flamenco.
The night air was cold enough for me to wrap my scarf tightly around my neck, but the gypsy girls were in short skirts and heels so high they made my ankles hurt just to look at them. They stamped their stiletto heels on the pavements and twirled their long, glittery nails through the air.
A gypsy girl sang, her rough voice ringing out over the sound of traffic and the sirens echoing in the distance, and one of the boys stepped forward to dance. He stood tall, his hands held high as he clapped the rhythm. He tossed his long black hair over his shoulders and stamped his fake leather shoes on the old stones of the square.
Olé…
This was the world that I longed to become a part of. I wanted to be able to sing with a raspy voice like the gypsy girls did, and tear up the cobblestoned streets like the boys. And I knew that I could if they let me in. But as I stood there, I might as well have been invisible. I was just another foreigner who’d strayed onto their turf.
LA SOLEÁ
Or
She want marry a gypsy!
“Sooo…do gypsies ever marry nongypsies?” I asked my class at the ministry.
“She want marry a gypsy!” Antonio declared to the class.
Everyone started shouting out at once, “No, Nellie! Keep away from gypsies! They are bad for you! We don’t want lose our teacher!”
“No!” I said, trying to make myself heard over their protests. “I don’t want to marry a gypsy. I’m only curious. And it’s ‘wants to.’ ‘She wants to marry a gypsy.’ Third-person singular,” I said, trying to use grammar to reestablish my authority.
But they weren’t buying it. I’d been asking too many questions about gypsies for it to be just idle curiosity. Every class I’d come in with different queries about how and where they lived. My class wasn’t stupid. They were on to me.
I had convinced myself that my gypsy stalking was really part of an informal anthropological study I was doing of this intriguing race of people. I was like one of those explorers who discover a tribe in the Amazon and observe their customs. Except that my Amazon was the capital of Spain, the trees were the apartment buildings of my neighborhood, and their huts were rent-controlled apartments in El Rastro. But who was I kidding? I wasn’t happy observing them through my imaginary binoculars and jotting down field notes. I wanted in. I just didn’t know how I was going to get there.
That night I walked home slowly through the old part of Madrid. I loved walking back after my last class of the day. I didn’t care if it took me an hour or more; each time I tried to take a different route, wandering down l
ittle lanes and alleyways. Getting lost is the best way to get to know a city.
Tonight I stumbled upon a street I’d never taken before, and as I walked along the pavement, I heard music coming from inside a bar. I stopped at the doorway where a bouncer stood. I could hear the sound of a guitar and someone singing flamenco.
The sound made my heart skip a beat. Only in Spain could I turn a corner and find myself on the doorstep of a new flamenco adventure. The sign above the door said LA SOLEÁ. I’d heard people talking of this place but hadn’t known where it was. The bouncer gestured for me to come inside, so I walked up the worn stone steps, between the iron gates, and into the bar.
The place must have been hundreds of years old, and the low stone ceilings gave it the feeling of a cave. Someone had told me that the old buildings in this historic part of town were originally used as dungeons in the days of the Inquisition. Now the stone walls were covered in black-and-white photos of all the famous flamenco artists who had frequented the bar over the years.
I stepped in through the doorway of the room where the music was coming from. It was filled with low tables and little wooden chairs where people sat over glasses of red wine, watching the musicians in the corner. An old flamenco singer dressed in a suit and a polka-dot tie leaned on a walking stick, which he picked up and banged into the floor every now and again to mark compás.
I looked around for a place to sit, but I couldn’t see an empty seat. A waiter with a tray of drinks beckoned me over and pointed to an empty space on a wooden bench next to a man he introduced as Juan. I heard the waiter tell Juan to keep an eye on me. I was confused by this. Did I need someone to look out for me? What kind of place was this? Looking around the crowd, I noticed a lot of long black hair and gold jewelry. Was this a gypsy bar?
Only in Spain Page 16