Ghosts of Spain

by Giles Tremlett

  Difficult, or not, the best-known palos came naturally to the crowd of gitano prisoners I found gathered for a flamenco workshop after the gates had clanked shut behind me in Seville’s jail.

  Spanish jails are remarkably modern, well equipped and tolerant places. Some boast glass-backed squash courts, swimming pools and theatres. Most of the British prisoners in them do not apply to serve their time back home in Britain’s run-down, aggressive, Victorian-built prisons. ‘I’ve seen the inside of Brixton, the Scrubs and a couple of others,’ a prison-hardened East End drug trafficker in Salamanca’s Topas jail told me once. ‘This is a million times better. I miss my mum, but I’m not going back.’

  ‘A country’s health can be measured by how it looks after its weakest members,’ a Spanish prison governor explained to me. If that is so, Spain is in fine fettle. Amongst other things, prisoners get private conjugal visits from their wives or girlfriends in rooms equipped with double beds. This jail, and others, are mixed, though the different sexes live in separate wings. Some couples even meet and get married in Spanish prisons.

  I had come to Seville’s jail to meet competitors in what must be one of the most specialised, but also one of the most passionate, musical competitions of all times – ‘El Concurso de Cante Flamenco del Sistema Penitenciario’, ‘The Flamenco Song Contest of the Penitentiary System’. It is against prison etiquette to ask why people are inside the talego, as Spanish jail argot calls a prison. So I had no idea why Rafael, a fifty-three-year old with flowing grey locks, shiny leather shoes, a choker of wooden beads and a massive gold ring on one finger was here. He was, respectfully, referred to as ‘tío’, ‘uncle’ by the younger Silva and twenty other men, almost exclusively gypsy, in the prison’s flamenco workshop. Murderers? Thieves? Drug dealers? Petty crooks? It did not matter. Prison is a leveller. Everybody here was sharing the same fate.

  Silva was a Tres Mil boy, and the most thoughtful and serious singer. He was the jail’s chosen representative for the sing-off at Granada prison a few weeks later. He belonged to the same clan, or extended family group, in the barrio as my musician friend Rafael. ‘When I am singing I stop feeling the pain. Only song, and tears, can get rid of it,’ he explained.

  Pain and joy, pena and alegría, are the two emotional motors of flamenco, but here, they explained, only one was available to them.

  Flamenco had been with them since the day they were born. It had been there at parties, baptisms, weddings and, often, in their parents’ voices around the house for as long as they could remember. ‘Sometimes I sit in a corner of the exercise yard and start singing. When I look up there are half a dozen gypsies there with me, tocando palmas,’ one explained.

  They were pleased with their workshop. Many had only known the three or four palos that were sung at home. Here, in a jail that houses gypsies from across Andalucía, they had extended their range. Most of all, however, this was an opportunity to unburden themselves through song and dance.

  Rafael had brought with him the songs of Algeciras and La Línea, the area of Cádiz around Gibraltar. ‘When I listen to Uncle Rafael, it breaks my heart,’ said Silva. Uncle Rafael was, indeed, extraordinary. His voice was all mud and gravel, so deep, thick, rough and heartfelt that Alfonso declared the style to be rancio – literally rancid, but somehow appropriate for a voice as thick as churned butter.

  They took turns to sing, twenty of them standing on the prison’s rudimentary theatre stage, beating out rhythms on their hands. Suddenly, there was something very feminine about this bunch of crooks. ‘Your voice sounds like peaches in nectar,’ shouted one in a fit of enthusiasm for a fellow inmate’s singing. ‘¡Hermoso mi primo! Beautiful, my cousin!,’ shouted another. Occasionally one stepped forward, arms elegantly raised, wrists cocked, delicately pacing out the first few steps of a dance before launching into a joyful, if somewhat out of control, moment of heel-drumming, hopping and spinning. A handful of the glassier-eyed prisoners looked as though they had no trouble finding drugs in jail, but there was no alcohol here to drive the juerga. It was not needed. The music itself was enough to carry them off.

  There was no sheet music. ‘No one would be able to read it,’ explained Alfonso, a professional flamenco singer and volunteer worker at the jail. Some had nevertheless mastered, without studying, the complex structures of soleás and siguiriyas.

  A few weeks after visiting Seville jail, I found myself in the visitors’ bar at Granada jail – a shiny, modern building sticking up, incongruously, out of fields of olive trees twenty miles from the city. I was here waiting to see the prison flamenco song final. A British photographer had asked to come along. ‘Wherever I go they have a bar,’ he said. And he was right. That morning we had had breakfast – freshly squeezed orange juice and thick, toasted rolls drowned in a garlic-flavoured olive oil and tomato pulp – at the bar in the Renault dealership in Seville. There are said to be more than 138,000 bars in Spain. This is as many as the rest of western Europe put together. The prison was doing its bit to keep the numbers up. The visitors downing café con leche and pastries, while waiting their turn to see inmates, were mostly gypsy families.

  ‘My husband is going to sing,’ one hefty matron – black dress, large bosom and a single gold tooth punctuating her smile – informed me. ‘Why can’t I watch?’

  They had brought the competitors in from a dozen jails – from as far away as Valencia and Extremadura, as well as from each of the eight Andalusian provinces. The presidents of all the Andalusian provincial associations of flamenco peñas – the flamenco clubs which were funding the prizes – were here to act as judges. These were mainly round-bellied, self-important men in jackets and ties. They were also sticklers for the proper observance of flamenco tradition or, at least, for their version of it. There was no gypsy amongst them, as far as I could tell. Nor were there any women. Ten out of the twelve finalists, however, were gypsies.

  I found Silva backstage, looking serious and feeling out of his depth. ‘I caught a cold in the police wagon on the way here,’ he complained, pointing to a throat that, he said, was now too sore to win prizes.

  The performers had rustled up their best clothing. There were, amongst the jeans and T-shirts of regular prison wear, a smattering of shiny, Cuban-heeled ankle boots, spotted cravats, waistcoats, black shirts and clanking medallions. In one case, a cream suit had even appeared. Despite the banter and desperate dragging on the flamenco voice’s greatest enemy – the Winston cigarette – most looked tense. It was hardly surprising. This was a serious event. Many had no real experience of singing in public.

  ‘This is not charity. We will judge them the way we would any other competition,’ the jury’s chairman told me. ‘We are looking for someone who might become one of the great voices. There are no concessions just because they are prisoners.’ He knew, however, that Spanish prisons were a secret repository of flamenco talent. Gypsies who would never enter a competition outside the prison walls would, in this unique competition, suddenly find their voices exposed to, and appreciated by, more than just friends or family. Here, perhaps more than anywhere else, a secret jewel could turn up.

  The nervousness of the competitors, then, was hardly surprising. When this competition was first launched, the prize included not just a small amount of money but a recording contract, a concert tour and, it turned out, early exit from jail. This time only the money and contract were on offer.

  The singer in the cream suit was a wiry, angular man. He could have stepped out of an El Greco painting. His hooked nose, beard and attitude of artistic superiority also gave him the air of a tenth-century Moorish Caliph.

  ‘I am a nightingale, kept behind bars,’ he said, in a conspiratorial tone. ‘This is a competition to the death. There are people here, inside prison, who sing much better than those outside.’ The Caliph later raised some of the loudest applause of the day from the audience of fellow inmates by singing: ‘They put me in jail just because I tried to defend myself.’

  Flame
nco, one contestant explained, was pain and quejío, a flamenco word to describe the outpouring of that same pain. ‘When you sing in jail, blood comes out of your mouth,’ he said.

  Most of the contestants had similar stories. Their music came from their families. Drugs or violent feuds between gypsy clans had brought them to jail. The prison walls pushed them deeper into themselves and deeper into their song. I was struck by the similarities to that other jailhouse music par excellence, the blues. Men with recording machines made the pilgrimage to the state penitentiaries of Mississippi as long ago as the 1930s in order to capture the music being made there. It is not surprising that, at the hands of that Tres Mil Viviendas family, the Amadors, blues and flamenco had finally met. ‘They are both about suffering and sentiment. Our peoples, gypsies and negros, have suffered a lot, or our ancestors have. We both, also, manage to wring a lot out of just a few notes,’ Raimundo Amador explained to me once. ‘Gypsies and negros both like gold, and giving away money to children, because we both believe in luck.’

  A jolly, round-bellied priest introduced the singers one by one, throwing the audience prison jokes and reading out the little biographical notes the prisoners had given him. ‘Manuel loves women and bulls,’ he declared, bringing cackling and catcalling from the ranks of the women prisoners in this mixed-sex jail. A burly female guard dived in amongst the rows of red plastic bucket seats and ordered the loudest offenders out of the theatre.

  For years I had had a love–hate relationship with flamenco, turned on by its recorded, studio-mixed output and especially by its more popular, but impure, versions. Camarón de la Isla, especially, had captured me with his pure cante jondo, the so-called ‘deep song’, and the records he made with guitarist Paco de Lucía. I had, however, almost always been disappointed by public performances. Only rarely did I find anyone who seemed to have been gripped by duende. Early trips to watch imitators of the great Camarón had a purely soporific effect on me. Yet I knew that, at its most passionate and profound, flamenco was meant to provoke extraordinary emotions. For some fans it is virtually a religion. There are tales of people ripping their shirts to shreds in excitement or being moved to tears. Camarón de la Isla even gained the nickname of acabareuniones after apparently provoking some visiting Galicians – hardly the most ‘flamencos’ of Spaniards – to start tearing up their own shirts. Good flamenco, I was constantly told, would make the hairs on my arm stand on end. And that, I discovered, was finally happening to me in Granada jail’s concert hall. It started with el Chanquete, a big, bearded payo from Marbella with a gentle, sweet voice. ‘I have a past in drugs that I now regret. Really, they ought to be letting me go home,’ he told me.

  Things got better as the afternoon went on. Backstage, guitarists and singers were indulging in bouts of spontaneous musicality, groups forming, breaking up and re-forming. On stage, soloists were being joined by other competitors to provide a backing chorus and palmas. Some ended up dancing their way up and down the stage to wild applause from the mainly gypsy public.

  The defining moment came with the appearance of a small, quiet man with a broad, nervous smile. In his black clothes and shiny boots, I had barely noticed him backstage. He came, anyway, from Valencia – hardly the cradle of flamenco. The stage, however, transformed him. He sat down beside the guitarist, stared down at the floor and steadied himself. Then he began pawing the floor slowly with one of those shiny, Cuban-heeled boots. His body tensed, a heel clicked against the floor, he reached out a hand to the audience, lifted his face to us and began to sing.

  He was called Ángel. He had a powerful, rich voice that Victor, the prison officer in charge of the show, compared to that of a once-famous singer of popular coplas, Rafael Farina. ‘In fact,’ said Victor, who obviously knew a thing or two, ‘He is probably even better than that.’

  Already excited by what was going on, both backstage and front, I found myself transfixed by this Ángel. A tingling, euphoric sensation came over me. It appeared to sweep through much of the audience too. The female prisoners jumped to their feet as the little man reached his peaks, then sat as he drew back into soft lament. Occasionally, a voice from the crowd would shout praise or encouragement. He got a standing ovation and I, finally, got the flamenco epiphany I had been seeking. I have never looked back. Ángel opened the door to a whole world of music – which I am only just beginning to explore.

  Afterwards, the jury and singers gathered beside the star attraction of any modern Spanish jail – the outdoor swimming pool. One jury member told me that the top four in the competition could all sing professionally. That provoked the fourth-place winner, a nervy, speedy gypsy from Madrid, to ask me to ‘have a word with the governor. See if you can get me a weekend pass. But what I really need is a manager. I’ve been going on stage since I was a child. I can sing anything.’

  Ángel came second. I would have chosen differently, but the jury had its rules. Ángel wore his talent lightly and was immensely, childishly pleased. The prizes were handed out by a once-famous female flamenco dancer whom I had never heard of. She gave the winners prints of herself dancing. The Valencian brought his over to me and, once again, I found myself doing the writing for a gypsy. ‘To María Heredia, con todo mi afecto!’ I scribbled on it. ‘I’m giving it to my girlfriend here in the jail,’ he said, winking. News of his triumph had probably already reached her. One of the women’s modules overlooked the swimming pool. A running commentary was being relayed from block to block via the peculiar Spanish prison language of hand signals. Manicured hands with long, crimson-painted fingernails poked out from behind the bars, gesticulating and wagging fingers in a private language far more complex, but just as secret, as the old fan language of Spanish courtiers. ‘I certainly don’t understand it,’ the prison’s deputy governor said.

  The prison flamenco contest has a chequered history. It started off with a bang, after the son of the great Agujetas won first place, tying with an expert in camaroneo (as singing in the style of Camarón de La Isla is known) called José Serrano. Both men were let out early and their record was released in the US. Later editions were far more modest or, simply, failed to happen, drowned in prison bureaucracy. With this edition, it was picking up again.

  I wanted to track down Antonio Agujetas, the son, and José Serrano to find out how the jail competition had changed their lives. My attempts to get hold of the former came to nothing. I called the local newspaper in Jerez, a town that is considered one of the last repositories of traditional, authentic flamenco. ‘I saw him in the street the other day, with a group of so-called friends. It was, I’m afraid, a pathetic sight,’ the newspaper’s flamenco expert confided to me. ‘He is in and out of drug rehabilitation programmes and argues with his father all the time. He’s in no state to be interviewed. It’s a sad story, but all too common.’

  Tracking down Serrano was similarly complicated. Eventually Antonio Estévez, a local builder and small-time flamenco patron in the industrial town of Dos Hermanas, just outside Seville, found him for me. ‘He’s a difficult man. I don’t know if you have been warned, but he is going to ask you for money,’ said Antonio. I had not been told. We had an uneasy meeting in a bar. Serrano was there with his wife – large, dark and frowning with suspicion – his trousers clumsily darned and several days’ stubble on his face. At forty-two, he was my age but looked a decade older. I refused to pay for an interview. Then, as his wife looked sternly on, he pleaded on behalf of his children. A twenty-euro note exchanged hands. His wife gleamed happily. It was a mistake. After that, Serrano gave whichever answer he thought I wanted to hear.

  We drove up to Cerro Blanco, a gypsy barrio of crumbling, one-storey houses in Dos Hermanas. Serrano ushered us into a dilapidated, single-bedroom house furnished with nothing more than a bed, a kitchen table, a few plastic chairs, a loudly humming refrigerator and a rusting sink. ‘What was the best thing about winning the prison flamenco contest?’ I asked. ‘Getting out of jail early,’ he replied with great conviction,
as a six-year-old son clung to his leg. ‘I saved myself three or four years inside. I couldn’t believe it when I got out. I kissed the ground, just like the Pope.’ He repeated the now familiar explanation about how prison added ‘sentiment’ to a flamenco voice. ‘Singing outside jail is not the same,’ he said. ‘You don’t get the same feeling.’

  Serrano had grown up in Las Tres Mil. He had started off as a child doing the rounds of Seville’s tourist cafes in the company of the Amador brothers, singing, dancing and passing around a hat. The Amadors had gone on to enjoy phenomenal success. Serrano had served eighteen years of a sentence for murder.

  He occasionally sang professionally, but winning the jailhouse flamenco contest had obviously not made him a star, or produced wealth. Dishevelled drunks and junkies wandered the barrio. The neighbouring houses, looking out over a patch of wasteland, were no better than his. Antonio, who dripped with gold accessories himself, had warned us not to bring any valuables. ‘They know me, so they won’t rob me,’ he said. ‘But you should be careful.’ Once again, however, the gypsies were more friendly than threatening.

  ‘He can’t be bothered to look for performances,’ explained Antonio, as we left. ‘If you don’t make an effort, people forget you. You know, I wanted you to do that interview, and I was about to give him money myself. But he’ll only spend some of it on food, the rest will probably go on cocaine.’