Ghosts of Spain (24 page)

Real Madrid had been spending more than it earned for years. When Pérez signed his deal in 2001 the club reportedly owed nearly 270 million euros. He turned it into a smooth machine, raking in merchandising money. Cash, however, is what drives the machine. Coaches, some fans suspect, field players who make the club money rather than those who play best. With money the dominating concept, the superstar players were not always
interested
in sweating out there on the pitch. When they did all decide to make an effort, however, even a Barcelona supporter and
natural
antimadridista
, such as myself, had to admit that something special was happening.

Football, of course, is one of the great Spanish passions. At a time when players, coaches and even fans come from all over the world, however, it is increasingly hard to identify anything different about the football played in Spain from that played elsewhere. In fact,
many of the things that once made Spain different – from siestas to multitudinous families – have all but disappeared. Bullfighting remains. This, the
fiesta nacional
, still gets written up daily on the culture pages of newspapers (it is considered art, not sport). It does not appal me, the way it does so many of my compatriots – and some Spaniards. I can see courage in it, but not art. It is not, in short, something that interests me.

There is, however, something recognisably artistic that remains distinctly Spanish. Flamenco, be it music or dance, has attracted the curious gaze of foreigners for more than a century. This
anglosajón
is no exception, though I am no expert. If I was to travel across modern Spain, I decided, I should take the
opportunity
to find out more – and have some fun doing it.

I have come to Seville on the AVE, the high-speed train that links the city to Madrid. When it began operating in 1992, the AVE slashed the overland travel time between the two cities by more than half. It did this in uncharacteristically smooth-running, gleaming, punctilious style. Benito Mussolini would have wanted one of these – a nation’s glory encased in a 300 kilometre per hour train. But here, too, is a monument to
enchufe
. Who, after all, doubts that the reason Seville got Spain’s first high-speed train was because a Socialist prime minister and his deputy, Felipe González and Alfonso Guerra, both came from here. It remains the envy of virtually every other major city in Spain. Not even Barcelona is connected to the capital like this, the job of shifting 5,000 business executives back and forth each day being done, instead, by fuel-guzzling, cramped and crowded shuttle jets. There is a whiff of corruption to the AVE too. A dozen years after it was completed, court cases are still pending to determine where all the money went.

Seville is the most seductive, sensuous city in Spain. Some complain that nothing of great import has happened here since the city lost its near monopoly on trade with Spain’s colonies in the seventeenth century. Drenched in New World wealth – in silver and gold from Peru and Mexico or Caribbean pearls and precious stones – Seville must have been one of the richest places on the planet. Visitors do not generally care that this all came to a rather abrupt halt. They may, in fact, like the idea. For they have been left the sixteenth-and seventeenth-century baroque
architecture
, the slow, charming pace of life, the broad Guadalquivir river lined with the terraces of bars and cafeterias, and the
white-and
ochre-painted charm of the old Jewish Santa Cruz district.

Everything here – from the perfume of the orange blossom to the lisping, lilting Andalusian accent – seems to insist that you acquiesce and give yourself up to its charms. ‘Don’t fight it,’ Seville commands, as you are lulled into a sensual stupor. ‘You are here to enjoy.’

Narrow, chaotic streets hide a multitude of secret places – squares, fountains, gardens, churches,
palacetes
, bars – allowing everybody to discover, and claim for their own, some favourite, hidden corner. Mine is a bar just around the corner from the Bridge of Triana. Here, at a shiny stainless steel counter, a team of hard-working waiters serve stewed bull’s tail, tomato soaked in oil and herbs, cubes of marinated, battered dogfish and glasses of cold
manzanilla
sherry. Also, though, there is the chapel at the Hospital de La Caridad. The prior, and chief benefactor, here was once the infamous, if reformed, seventeenth-century philanderer Miguel de Mañara. This prototype Don Juan asked for the
following
words to be inscribed where his ashes were put to rest: ‘Here lie the bones and ashes of the worst man the world has ever known.’ The dark, cruel paintings here by Juan Valdés, with their disintegrating corpses of finely dressed bishops, seem to accuse this overstuffed city of being obsessed with mundane brilliance. The chapel is so full of saints, virgins, tubby, winged cherubs and the inevitable, in Seville, paintings of Murillo that, as one local writer told me, ‘There is simply no room for anything else.’ Then there is the broad boulevard known as the Alameda de Hercules at night, with its bohemian, slightly shabby, air. Around the
corner
, prostitutes sit out on chairs in the street, fanning themselves in the heat. Even they are not in a hurry to hustle. Once you start making the list of personal jewels, in fact, it is hard to stop. Seville, like a haughty Andalusian beauty, simply demands your attention.

It seemed a shame, therefore, to be stashing my valuables in a lock-up at Santa Justa railway station, keeping just a small amount of money in my pocket and preparing to turn my back on the more obvious delights of the city. This time, however, I had not come here looking for baroque Seville. I was not here for the spotted dresses and handsome, oil-haired
jinetes
, horsemen, of
the April Fair. Nor was I coming to see the spooky Easter Week processions of the ku-klux-klan-hooded
nazarenos
as they parade their statues of the Virgin Mary and Jesus. Attractive as these things are, they sometimes feel like part of a fossilised, if
lovingly-maintained
, Seville past. I was, instead, on a quest. I wanted to find the raw, unadulterated soul of modern flamenco. For that, I needed to find Seville’s live, beating, musical heart. I knew I was not going to find it in the city-centre tourist shows, the flamenco
tablaos
.

I took a hire car – insured against all eventualities – and drove out past the tropical-looking gardens of the Parque María Luisa and the pavilions left standing from Seville’s first international expo, held in 1929. From here, the broad and elegant Avenida de la Palmera, with its tall palms and purple flowering jacarandas, pointed me out in the direction of the sherry town of Jerez.
Elegant
, turn-of-the-century mansion houses lined the road, though most seemed to have become offices for international accountancy firms. Then came the imposing stadium of Real Betis Balompié, one of the city’s two eternal rivals in the country’s soccer first division (the other is Sevilla FC).

Here, rather than continue towards the promised land of Jerez or the delights on the coast at Cádiz, I took a sharp left. The urban landscape went rapidly downhill. The car ducked under a railway line and there, easily recognisable by the junked cars, the patches of balding wasteland and the colourful rubbish piled about, was the most infamous barrio in Seville, ‘
Las Tres Mil Viviendas
’, ‘The Three Thousand Homes’. I am glad, at this stage, that nobody had told me, as I sat waiting at the traffic light, that some local citizens were, at that time, raising their own particular tax for visiting or leaving the barrio. A brick through the windscreen as you waited at the lights, a wrench on the car door, a wave of a knife and the highwaymen of Las Tres Mil would snatch whatever they wanted.

There are monuments to the failure of 1960s planning all over western Europe. Las Tres Mil is Seville’s offering. This is where the gypsies of the riverside neighbourhood of Triana, once the cradle of flamenco, were moved. They were sent here together with
chabolistas
, shanty-town dwellers, from the outskirts of the city, some of whose homes had disappeared when a tributary of the River Guadalquivir, the Tamarguillo, overflowed its banks. They were, according to the jargon of the time, ‘
la gente del Aluvión
’, the ‘people of the flood’. Las Tres Mil, The Three Thousand Homes, was to be their Ark.

Perched on the west bank of the broad River Guadalquivir, their original barrio of Triana looks across its murky waters at old Seville. From its riverside cafes you look out at the splendours of the Torre de Oro, the white walls of the Maestranza bull-ring, the palm-lined Paseo Cristóbal Colón and a city skyline crowned by the twelfth-century minaret turned cathedral bell-tower, the Giralda. For several hundred years this was part of Seville’s
docklands
. It was famous for its artisans. Their reputations spread, in the wake of the Spanish galleons, across the New World. Fifty years, or a century ago, this would also have been the place to look for the raw substance of flamenco. Théophile Gautier, the French Romantic, came across a group of gypsies camped out beside a bubbling cauldron. ‘Beside this impoverished hearth was seated a
gitana
with her hook-nosed, tanned and bronze profile, naked to the waist, a proof that she was completely devoid of coquetry … This state of nudity is not uncommon, and shocks no one,’ he said.

In the 1950s, flamenco was still part of its everyday life. ‘In the afternoon one could hear the tune of
bulerías
and
tangos
(two flamenco styles or
palos
) coming from a cluster of houses. A baptism, a wedding, a request for a woman’s hand in marriage, a son returned from military service, a woman who had just won the lottery … any event set the tribe into action. Triana still had melody,’ recalls Ricardo Pachón, a flamenco producer who grew up there.

From Triana the gypsy singers and dancers would be called across the river for the
juergas
, or parties, of wealthy
señoritos
and bullfighters. They would come, too, to the popular
cafés cantantes
of the late nineteenth century and, in the twentieth century, to the
tablaos
, the tourist shows. Then they were dispatched back across
the bridge to their own side of town. Spaniards as a whole have never learned to love their gypsies – who are estimated to number some 650,000. Even today polls show that many would rather not live beside them.

There are gypsies left in Triana, but nothing like there used to be. The melody has gone. Las Tres Mil was an excuse for a huge real-estate scam. The gypsies were lured away from their forges and houses in the Cava de Los Gitanos and the
chabolas
on the edges of Triana.

They were promised brand new, ‘modern’ housing. Orders were issued for the demolition of their old homes, many with shared patios that acted as the centre of social, and cultural, life. The Cava de Los Civiles (literally ‘the civilians’), the
payo
,
non-gypsy
part of Triana, remained relatively untouched. Gleaming new blocks – their unimaginative name of ‘The Three Thousand Homes’ a giveaway to the bureaucratic nature of the project – way to the south of the city would keep them happy. It would also keep them out of sight and, by extension, out of mind.

In the tower blocks of The Three Thousand, one of Spain’s most enduring urban legends was born. An old gypsy, at a loss about what to do with his mule in a fourth-floor flat, made him a stable in the spare room. By day the mule would work or, simply, feed on the grassy verges of Las Tres Mil. At night, however, his owner stuck him in the lift and took him home. A local
photographer
snapped the donkey peering out of a window. Ever since then, first-hand sightings of donkeys have been made, almost always falsely, in the flats of gypsies wherever they settle in
high-rise
Spain.

Las Tres Mil is part of a vast collection of similar estates properly known as the Polígono Sur. The latter houses some sixty thousand people, 20 per cent of them gypsies. They are hemmed in on three sides: by the railway tracks to Cádiz; by the busy
Carretera de Su Eminencia
, the Highway of His Eminence; and by the high walls of what used to be the Hytasa textile factory. One in every twelve Sevillanos live here. That is 1 in 700 Spaniards.

The rudimentary four-to eight-storey blocks drip with
colourful
washing. Self-built walled or fenced gardens eat up the wide pavements. Some are outdoor cages, covered in wrought iron bars to keep out the junkies who come to shop in the city’s drugs supermarket, a desolate corner of the barrio known as Las Vegas. Immortalised in a song, ‘
En la Esquina de Las Vegas
’, by the flamenco-blues guitarist-singer Raimundo Amador, this wretched, abandoned section of Las Tres Mil is home to thriving communities of rats and cockroaches.

The first time I drove in here, I had not yet worked out quite how bad Las Vegas was. On two visits, separated by a year, the talk each time was of a shoot-out as the drugs clans fought their turf wars. The odd police car cruises by. But Las Vegas is a place without law. The occasional shiny Mercedes or huge white van are a sign that, despite the trappings of poverty, large sums of money run through the barrio. Three gypsy clans are said to rule the place.

My first guide to Las Tres Mil was a man I will call Rafael, a local gypsy musician and producer. Driving through Las Vegas with him was a disturbing experience. Bonfires blazed on strips of wasteland, gypsy youths gathered around them. There used to be traffic lights here. Now there are decapitated posts with jagged, rusting tops. Rafael showed me a rough, hand-painted sign pointing to some kind of chapel. The sign pointed to a hole in a wire fence which, in turn, only gave access to the back of a
semi-abandoned
building and the waste ground around it. ‘That is where they go to do their
culto
, to worship, after they shoot up,’ he explained. ‘They have a little room down there somewhere. They say there are pictures of Christ on the walls.’

Skeletal junkies, the war-injured of the narcotics trade, shuffle backwards and forwards. Poorly bandaged wounds are evidence of the daily damage they inflict on themselves. ‘I call them
mutilados
– the mutilated ones,’ explained Rafael.

Some of the
mutilados
are themselves gypsies. Heroin has scythed its way like a grim reaper, syringe in hand, through one generation of Spanish gypsies. It now threatens a second one. Many junkies, gypsies or
payos
, have come to live here, scraping a living from the drug trade in order to fuel their own addictions.
Some blocks are half abandoned. Flats change hands for as little as 150 euros, with no paperwork and no proof of ownership – just a roof and little else except a ready supply of heroin or cocaine.

Groups of dealers hang out by the wrought-iron cages that have been put across the entrances to each of the apartment blocks. A permanent layer of rubbish lines each street and the big green rubbish containers are burned out heaps of twisted, molten plastic. We passed an almost completely abandoned eight-storey block. A curtain of rough material hung across the entranceway, giving the smack addicts a bit of privacy as they hunted for undamaged veins. ‘Look!’ said Rafael, pointing to a gushing sewer pipe. ‘The shit is just falling into their back yards.’

The rest of Seville is frightened of this place. ‘Don’t go there,’ they told me in a Seville production company that had made a film on the barrio’s flamenco talents. ‘You won’t find a taxi driver ready to take you.’ In fact, I have never found a taxi driver who refused to go to Las Tres Mil or most of the rest of Polígono Sur. Las Vegas, however, was out of bounds. ‘They have car races there – and they don’t care about looking before crossing a junction,’ apologised one driver. A young French photographer I ran into here was greeted afterwards in a bar in central Seville as if he had returned from the front line of a war. The waitress almost fainted with relief when he reappeared. She did not know that we had spent the afternoon with José Jiménez, ‘el Bobote’, a flamenco dancer who travels the globe accompanying some of Spain’s greatest dancers. He had chosen to continue living in his flat here, despite also owning a house in a middle-class district of town.