Ghosts of Spain (25 page)

The first people I spoke to in Las Tres Mil were three local Spanish Jehovah’s Witnesses – inheritors, if you like, of the
bible-selling
tradition of that nineteenth-century British eccentric George Borrow who befriended gypsies and wrote extravagant travel books. ‘Are you carrying anything valuable? Don’t let them know you are foreign. It’s dangerous,’ they warned. In fact, if you discount Las Vegas, Las Tres Mil is no worse than many inner-city estates in Britain. With its streets alive with people, it is, in some ways, a lot better.

The first time I came here, Rafael was still trying to get something done about Las Vegas. He wanted a police station here, but
suspected
his efforts would not work. The police, and authorities, he had concluded, preferred to have Seville’s ‘drugs supermarket’ here in a corner of Las Tres Mil than elsewhere in town. The barrio’s grim statistics are, as a result, nothing short of spectacular. One in three children do not even make it through the school gates in the
morning
. ‘We get people who are sixteen, eighteen or twenty turning up here who have never stepped inside a school,’ explained one teacher at an adult education centre. Some residents do not, officially, exist. ‘They have no ID card, no social security number. It’s as if they had never been born,’ a social worker told me.

I had not come to Las Tres Mil, however, to see its miseries but, instead, to discover the miracles that burst from its
asphalted-over
soil. For, if Triana, along with Jerez, the Bay of Cádiz and a handful of other spots strung along the line connecting them, was once the cradle of flamenco, Las Tres Mil can claim to be a new repository of that tradition. It is also the birthplace of some of
flamenco’s
newest, most surprising, offshoots. Flamenco is by no means an exclusively gypsy music. Many of its greatest exponents, however, are gypsies.

Triana’s gypsies brought their music with them. The new generations from the barrio have flamenco in their veins. But these are modern, urban gypsies. They have also grown up with rock, pop, punk, hip-hop and the influences of ‘world music’. They have fused flamenco with modern urban sounds, or with music and instruments from far away, adding to the continued expansion of Spain’s unique contribution to the worlds of music and dance.

Flamenco and its new bastard varieties, which stretch from flamenco-rock and flamenco-rap to easy listening
flamenquillo
, is everywhere in Las Tres Mil. It spills out of kitchen windows, hammers out of car sound systems and plays on people’s lips. In bars and on street corners, it can suddenly appear. A man draws the first few phrases of a song out from deep inside him, and suddenly his friends are
tocando palmas
, beating out a complex,
staccato, machine-gun rhythm with their hands. This, along with a dancer’s stamping feet, is the traditional source of flamenco’s percussion. If the song is successful, that might just be the start. The
juerga
– the partying – begins. Nobody can predict when it will end. That, anyway, was what I had been told – though the reality, in my brief experience of the barrio, did not quite live up to the description. This, though, was why I had come to Las Tres Mil. A decent flamenco
juerga
in the barrio, I was told, was
something
that should not be missed.

The barrio’s list of flamenco artists is long and glorious. This is the home of Farruquito, the latest dance phenomenon to start touring the globe, and the rest of his clan. His family’s flamenco pedigree stretches back several generations. From here, too, come the Amador brothers, guitarists Raimundo and Rafael, who fused flamenco with the blues. With a group called Pata Negra they proudly declared that ‘
todo lo que me gusta es ilegal, imoral o engorda
’ – ‘everything I like is illegal, immoral or makes me fat’. Rafael Amador has fallen victim to the barrio’s worst side. Drugs and alcohol have spoilt, if not his talent, then at least his ability to use it. Raimundo, meanwhile, has pursued a highly successful solo career. He sometimes plays with his blues idol, B. B. King.

Some of the best-rated singers, men like the mysterious Pelayo, a Las Vegas gypsy who has spent many years in jail, refuse to sing professionally. They will only sing if they feel
la gana
, ‘the urge’.

El Esqueleto, a civic centre just around the corner from Las Vegas, is a prime example of the surreal, absurdist sense of humour of Las Tres Mil. Like much of what has happened in this neighbourhood, it was started in a burst of enthusiasm but was abandoned when only half built. What was left was a jumble of beams, pillars and girders, a skeleton of a building which soon became known in barrio jargon as just that, ‘
el esqueleto
’. By the time the building was restarted, the name had stuck. It now bears the grandiose name of The Skeleton Civic Centre.

My search for a decent
juerga
did not start successfully. Rafael told me it was impossible to predict where and when one might happen. I could hang about the barrio for weeks without getting
lucky. On a warm summer’s evening, however, he called me to meet him at El Esqueleto. A working musician, composer and
enthusiastic
promoter of local talent, he wanted me to witness the public presentation of his latest musical discovery. ‘
Es un monstruo
’ – ‘He is a singing monster,’ he insisted. A local Andalusian television
station
was devoting an arts show to Las Tres Mil. Rafael’s newly found young talent, a teenage gypsy boy, was to sing.

Among the crowd gathered here at the door to El Esqueleto was
el Indio
, The Indian. A former
novio de la muerte
(fiancé of death), or member of the Spanish Legion,
el Indio
is a Seville eccentric. He dresses as a Red Indian brave, complete with a homemade bow and sheath of arrows. If this was Seville’s Wild West,
el Indio
played the part of its downtrodden native.

Today he was bereft of his bow and arrow – they had been
confiscated
, once more, by the police – and was dressed just in shorts. His weathered, sagging body was criss-crossed with scars that welled up over a patchwork of fading tattoos. A white feather was stuck through a hole in his left nipple. A single spike of hair pointed up to the sky from the centre of an otherwise shaved head.
El Indio
is a
payo
– a non-gypsy – who knows how to make the gypsies laugh. They salute him with that time-honoured, hand-raised Indian greeting – ‘How!’

A scar on his stomach was the result of an operation on a burst gut. ‘I drank too much beer,’ he explained. No reason was offered, however, for another set of scars, which poured off his right shoulder like molten wax. They ran in raw, red dribbles of raised skin down his arm and chest.

Two gypsy brothers, Juan and Rafa Ruiz, joined us, hoping to get on the show. They had been singing and dancing on the streets of Seville for years but dreamt of becoming real, professional artists. They get occasional invitations to play at
romerías
, the
festive
pilgrimages of the summer months in Andalucía, or for parties of huntsmen, modern-day
señoritos
who like to end a day of blasting at wild boar or deer with music and
juerga
. ‘When the party is on, everyone wants to be a gypsy, but when it is over, they don’t want to know anything about you,’ explained Rafael.

Juan began to strum a rhythm.
El Indio
broke into dance, his body curving around his flabby, exposed belly as he stamped the tiled floor with his dilapidated sneakers, beat his thighs and threw himself into a clumsy spin. The gypsies cracked up with laughter.

The television studio was in a small theatre in the centre of Seville. I took Juan and Rafa and a couple of teenagers from a music workshop at The Skeleton, who were also due to play, in my car. They wanted the air conditioning on full blast and the windows closed. ‘The wind will wreck my hairstyle,’ explained one. Juan spent the journey fiddling with the radio trying to find a station playing decent
flamenquillo
.

At a traffic light, Juan wound down the window and, for no apparent reason, started shouting to a Japanese girl. ‘Hello
guapa
– good-looking – don’t you remember me?’ Words and smiles were exchanged. The window was rolled back up. ‘I know her,’ he explained. ‘She sings
bulerías
.’ Even the Japanese, he said, were hung up on flamenco.

At the television studio, Rafael introduced me to the ‘monster’. Carlos was seventeen years old, pouring with sweat, but already affecting a star’s disdain for lesser mortals. He instructed a
photographer
not to take pictures of him. ‘You can do the others,’ he said.

As it got closer to his performance, Carlos’s already
considerable
range of nervous tics and twitches increased. He pinched his nose, scratched his chin, craned his head forward to stretch his neck muscles and, with both hands at once, tried to fan himself. An hour before it was time to go on stage, his shirt was already drenched through. His cool, clean ‘look’ was getting increasingly wrinkled. Occasionally he let out a thin, clear, falsetto note and loosened his throat with the first few bars of the purest-sounding flamenco, his voice gliding through the quarter tones. The boy obviously had talent.

A production assistant came backstage carrying a form. It was Carlos’s agreement to cede his performance rights for the evening. He looked at it in panic and handed it to Juan. He, in turn, looked at it in panic and handed it to me. It was my job to fill it in. As I asked Carlos to spell out his name, I realised why I
was doing this. Carlos could only just spell. The speed with which Juan handed the form over made me suspect he could not read either. Little surprise, then, that the constant lament of the artists in Las Tres Mil is that they are ‘being ripped off ’. Finally it was time for the
monstruo
to appear on his television debut. Rafael had invented a twee stage name for him. He has a surname, however, that would ring bells amongst the local flamenco cognoscenti – that of a family of Triana singers.

The performance, when it came, was a disaster. Carlos was being launched, not as a flamenco singer but as a sort of pop
balladeer
. He sang a middle-of-the-road, instantly forgettable ditty penned for him, I suspect, by Rafael. This is an old trick. Pure
flamenco
is hard work, with a small, intense, knowledgeable, and highly critical, hard core of buffs. If you want to make money, sing something else. To make things worse, Carlos did it to
playback
and did it badly. His lips and contorted, pop-star body movements were badly out of sync with the words being sung.

Afterwards, we congratulated him effusively. He thought he had done well and there, out on the street, as the boys and girls from the music workshop were packing their percussion in the back of the van, he broke into true song. It was the same high, clear, pure flamenco voice he had warmed up with. Shed of all pressure, and of the baggage of pop culture, he was a flamenco thoroughbred. The boys from Rafael’s workshop could not help but reach for their instruments and start beating a rhythm. I tried to work out what form of flamenco he was singing. A
high-pitched
tanguillo
perhaps? I wished I knew more.

By now, however, it was 2 a.m. We were in a narrow, residential street in the old quarter. The security guards came rushing out of the theatre, trying to shush everybody up. A few minutes earlier the show’s production team had been treating the Tres Mil gypsies as artists, plying them with drink, slices of cured Serrano ham and canapés. Now they were out on the street again and not
needed
. Guillermo, a music producer, looked on. ‘If they do that in their barrio, people just say: “Hey, look. He’s in a good mood.” But you can’t do that here, not in the centre of town.’

The kids from the Tres Mil piled back into their van and were gone, singing their way home. We were not invited to the
juerga
which, I suspected, would carry on back in the barrio. A line still separates
gitano
from
payo
. I was not going to force my way across it. I was, however, enviously aware of missing something. I realised I would have to look elsewhere for my raw, pure flamenco.

My next stop, I decided, should be a place where gypsies have plenty of time to sing and nowhere to escape to. That meant
taking
the road out of Seville towards Mairena, to a building whose purpose could be recognised by its high, modern brick walls and even higher watchtower – Seville’s jail.

The relationship between jails, gypsies and flamenco is as old as flamenco itself. At the base of the family tree of flamenco styles lie the
tonás
which are, in turn, divided into the
martinetes
(
originating
from the blacksmith’s forge), the
deblas
(from the gypsy word for goddess) and the
carcelera
, the prison song. The words to these songs speak of five hundred years of persecution of gypsies and their culture.

The
carcelera
predates the introduction of musical instruments into flamenco, throwing it back, at least, to the mid-nineteenth century when the first written accounts of the music appeared. It may come from even earlier, perhaps to the time in the eighteenth century when Fernando VI ordered Spain’s gypsies to be jailed if they refused to give up their
caló
language and way of life.

It is a pure lament of prison hardship – a sub-genre of the
global
experience of gypsy pain and suffering that has fuelled, and continues to fuel, much of flamenco. The words to one typical
carcelera
go like this: