Ghosts of Spain (29 page)

Camarón’s first dozen records were made with the guitarist Paco de Lucía, under the benevolent dictatorship of the latter’s father. They are serious, straight flamenco albums – part of a total output of some twenty records which, in life, only sold around 360,000 copies.

Camarón’s final albums took ages to record. He would,
occasionally
, slip off into a state of numbed semi-consciousness. His penultimate album was called, simply,
Soy Gitano
, I am a Gypsy. Even when he was off the drugs and battling cancer, he had his own mixture of favourite prescription drugs – rohypnol and other downers – that he would put together to cope with the pain and withdrawal.

Camarón toyed with his body the way he would muck about with the recording machines that he collected, but never really mastered. Just as he saw the machines as practitioners of some sort of musical alchemy, so he gave his body over to the alchemy of powders, pills and liquids. He was, eventually, out of his skull much of the time.

In the end, he needed a personal nurse to help him manage his habit and point him towards various cures. At one stage he suffered temporary paralysis to a hand. At the nurse’s house he would chase the heroin dragon and then turn suddenly,
uncharacteristically, loquacious. When the nurse and his wife finally went to bed, a puppy-like Camarón occasionally turned up in their room saying he was lonely. Paranoias crept in. He disliked solitude. And nothing is more lonely than the road. Towards the end, all he wanted was to be with la Chispa and his children. ‘I’ll study a lot and make a record every couple of years,’ he told friends. Tobacco, inhaled deep, held down, smoked with a
profound
and needy pleasure, stopped that happening. In fact, by the time he died, tobacco had already done serious damage to the quality of that voice and, especially, the lungs that drove it. Camarón, unbelievably, had begun to lose that remarkable
control
of pitch and breathing that was part of his uniqueness. He could not control his breath sufficiently to sing the more difficult
palos
as he would have liked to. Some of the posthumous releases of his music have used the artificial wonders of recording studio machines to improve the mythical voice.

Sung flamenco is a complex, difficult thing. There are strict rules about rhythm. And there are dozens of
palos
. Each has its own rule-book and, often, exacting demands on the singer’s ability. By the time he was fifteen, when Antonio Vargas recorded him at the Venta de Vargas – the noise of the occasional lorry coming down the road audible in the background – Camarón had a virtuoso’s control of many of them. But he also had a
distinctive
voice which, magically, tapped the raw, emotional depths of
cante jondo
, while still retaining a master’s control. ‘He
improvised
often without adulterating the essence … He searched for points where he could twist and tease the traditional styles so as to make the resulting song his own,’ the critic Manuel Ríos explains.

It was when he went to Madrid and met up with an
extraordinary
young guitarist called Paco de Lucía, that the amazing things began to happen. A whole school of flamenco had grown up with the rule-book as written by Antonio Mairena, a singer and
academic
of flamenco who died in 1983 having ‘recovered’, and written down, many of the older
palos
. Camarón and de Lucía were part of a new generation which gradually introduced changes.

New instruments appeared. The old formula of guitar and voice was widened out. The guitar itself went from being
principally
an instrument of accompaniment to having a strong voice of its own. De Lucía brought in a percussion instrument from Peru, the
cajón
– a wooden box that the player sits on and beats – which is now an accepted part of flamenco. Flutes, bass instruments and string sections also appeared. The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra even played on one album.

The break with orthodoxy came after Camarón split, not so much with Paco de Lucía, but with his father. The father, Antonio Sánchez, produced Camarón’s first eleven records, with his son always on the guitar. When Camarón changed producer in 1979, he turned to Ricardo Pachón. The result was
La Leyenda del
Tiempo
, a record which scandalised purists. Even some gypsies returned it to the shops, claiming ‘this is not Camarón’. The poetry Pachón and co-composer Kiko Veneno turned to for the words to their music was not the old romance stuff but later Spanish classics like Lorca and, even, the Persian Omar Khayám. They also brought in instruments as foreign and bizarre – to flamenco purists – as keyboards, electronic bass and, even, a sitar. It was, according to one biographer, ‘the most important flamenco record of recent decades’. Camarón himself was scared by the reaction of the purists, and asked to tone things down in later albums, but a mould had been broken. Spanish geniuses, however, famously take a long time to achieve recognition. The record sold only 5,482 copies before his death.

It was enough, however, to take flamenco to a new audience. ‘Suddenly the people who liked what he was doing were the same people who liked rock or who liked jazz,’ Pachón told me after waving me into his Seville townhouse in what looked like a Japanese kimono. Camarón started appearing at international festivals. The world’s musicians began to fall in love with him. ‘He was a musician’s musician. Those who knew, could tell he was doing something extraordinary. It didn’t matter what their own musical background was,’ explained Montiel. The list of admirers was long, from Mick Jagger to Quincy Jones.

A would-be young Spanish rock star known as El Gran Wyoming (who would go on to be a motor-mouthed, satirical television presenter) was dragged, unwillingly, to a Camarón concert and remembered it like this. ‘This wasn’t a show, it was something else. That man was not going through a memorised repertory. He wasn’t pretending. I saw my idols of that moment.
El Camarón
was like Janis Joplin, like Joe Cocker, like Jimi Hendrix. He wasn’t good or bad. He was, as the saying went back then, “strong stuff”.’

Camarón’s rise coincided with a special period in Spanish
history
, a sudden explosion of freedom released by Franco’s death. And here was flamenco, stripped of its tacky, folkloric, flag-waving adornments. It was, if you like, a people’s music, at a time when the people were, once more, in control.

Flamenco’s continuing development is best summed up in the words of one nineteenth-century
soleá
. ‘How are you going to compare/ a pool of water with a fountain?’ it asks. ‘The sun comes out and dries the pool/But the fountain keeps on flowing.’
Flamenco
has kept on flowing, and changing. Spain is the wealthier, and luckier, for it. It boasts one of the Continent’s few, living, evolving home-grown music and dance forms. It is a vivacious beast that time, fashion, the disdain of some and the over-enthusiastic embrace of others have all been unable to put down.

On the tenth anniversary of his death, I took my partner – a die-hard Camarón fan – and children to a flamenco mass in Camarón’s memory at the church on the Calle Real. My partner soon proved that Camarón, even from the grave, could exert a star’s debilitation of his fans’ nervous systems and mental
composure
. There were tears in the car, outbursts of rage at the idea that we might arrive late and a jumpy desire to see la Chispa and Camarón’s children – would they look like him? – in the flesh. A priest, well-known for his love of flamenco, had come from Madrid to take the service. He sang much of it himself, mostly off-tune, to flamenco
palos
and, eventually, in a very un-priestly moment, shed tears for Camarón. At the door afterwards we thanked him, saying we had never seen a priest cry in church before. ‘Some priests are very roguish … but we are also good
people,’ he replied. It could have been an epitaph for Camarón himself.

On a Sunday evening in Seville, I followed another Tres Mil gypsy, Amaro, and his family in their huge green Renault Master van out past the rubbish and bonfires of Las Vegas. We crossed the wide Avenida de la Paz to a street of warehouse units and
workshops
, appropriately named Las Herramientas, the Street of Tools. Here, squeezed between a frozen foods warehouse, a
metal-beating
workshop and a place selling second-hand fridges, was a unit that had been turned into a chapel of the Evangelical Church of Philadelphia.

Popularly known as the ‘Gypsies’ church’, the evangelicals have captured some 100,000 Spanish gypsies – some 15 per cent of the total – since the first few gypsy pastors were recruited while
picking
grapes in France in the 1960s. As flamencoised music blasted out from the unit that housed the church, Melchor, the pastor, explained why it has done so well. ‘The gypsies have, historically, been ignored and forgotten, not just socially, economically and politically but in the religious sense as well. The Catholic priests never explained the Gospel well,’ he explained. ‘I feel proud of my culture, of who we are. The evangelical church does not ask you to change your culture. It embraces it. We write our songs and use our own rhythms, with all their strength and ability, to express our feelings. Here it is gypsies who do the singing and who do the preaching,’ he said.

Although the church also welcomes
payos
, I found it hard to spot any amongst the two hundred people sat on the hard wooden benches, women on the left and men on the right. Wind whistled through the warehouse roof, clad in rainwater-stained chipboard, and strip lights hung from bare metal girders.

The contrast with the overstuffed baroque churches of old Seville could not have been greater. The walls of the gypsy chapel were of rough-painted breeze-block. A couple of posters provided the only decoration. One, bearing a photo of a
waterfall
in green woodlands, exhorts: ‘To all the thirsty, come to the waters.’

There were babies in pushchairs and kids running backwards and forwards, fighting over crisps, or taking messages from their mother to their father and vice versa. There was music, too, and
palmas
.

The message from the preacher struck at the hearts of a people used to living on the margins, suspicious of a world ruled by ambition, frenetic work and money. ‘The system of this world is “Have, have and have more”. It produces hate and enmity. It brings chaos and death,’ the preacher, a large gypsy man in a beige suit and tie with his top button undone, said amid loud cries of ‘Amen!’ ‘Alleluya!’ and ‘Blessed be God!’ ‘The system of God is to forgive, to forget and to live in delight. It says: “I am happy with what I have and will give what I can.” It brings love and a chance to live in delight and full freedom.’

Melchor explained that the church was also heavily involved in drug rehabilitation and education. I had already been told that ignorance was largely to blame for heroin’s success amongst
gypsies
– with one group of women in Algeciras getting hooked after using it to deal with period pains. ‘Drugs are a social problem that affect the poor especially and, within the poor, the gypsies. We have to educate our young,’ he said. ‘We ourselves have had
problems
and the Gospel helped us. Many gypsies have been
rehabilitated
this way.’

There was a strong sense, despite the apocalyptic,
fundamentalist
rhetoric, of honest men (for this was a male-led affair, though the women’s pews were fuller) determined to lead their families through the dangerous waters of a world into which Spain’s gypsies, by choice or not, sometimes find it so hard to fit. I am no church-lover. Stepping out of the industrial unit at the end of the service, however, amid hand-shaking and back-slapping, I found myself wishing these Philadelphians well. I was concerned, too, for the children here and their worried parents.

Camarón, a man whose clanking neck jewellery could include, at the same time, chains and medallions bearing images of the Virgin of El Rocío, the Star of David, the Christ of San Fernando or the anchor of the Brotherhood of Esperanza of Triana, was
never much interested in the evangelicals – though his wife, la Chispa, was. His chosen delights were, in the end, his ruin.

Rafael told me a story, one which Camarón’s brother Manuel did not recognise and Enrique Montiel thought could be another myth to have emerged around his figure. ‘Two days before his death, a doctor who was treating him in Barcelona found a note he had written on the bedside table. The man kept it. Now he feels guilty about it, and wants to get it back to the family,’ said Rafael, who claimed to have read a copy. ‘The letter said the following: “To all the young people. Life is beautiful, but it is also bad. I, who am telling you this, am almost free.”’

Rafael, unfortunately, did not seem to have grasped the
message
. Driving around Las Tres Mil one day I saw him striding off towards Las Vegas. He was a man obviously looking for a deal. He had admitted to using coke a bit, but swore there was nothing untoward in an occasional habit. ‘When you have children you have to start acting responsibly. You have to know how to control yourself or you are lost,’ he had said.

On my return several months later, however, he failed to answer my phone calls. I wondered whether I had offended him. Eventually a mutual friend explained. Rafael had been swallowed up by Las Vegas. It was time to move on, to leave Spain’s gypsies and their remarkable music behind. I wanted to stay away from politics and history, however. The country’s endless roads, and their bars, had introduced me to some of the stranger offshoots of flamenco. Now it was time to turn off them to visit somewhere else. I wanted to find out what lay behind the colourful neon signs that, so loudly and obviously, decorate a different kind of
roadside
establishment.

I have retired to my local bar to leaf through the morning
newspapers
. Breakfast is served without any words being exchanged between myself and the waiter, beyond a brisk ‘
buenos días
’. He knows my order. It appears automatically, the clanking, bashing, steaming and sizzling of coffee machine and
plancha
, the hot plate used for frying and toasting, starting as soon as I am spotted walking through the door. This can be a complex business. How do you keep your fingers clean when the toasted roll you have been given has a large pool of olive oil washing over its crusty banks? And, once the oil is on your fingers, how do you stop it sticking the pages of your newspaper together? The little, square, tissue serviettes, grabbed from the plastic container on my table, pile up in front of me.

When it comes to sex surveys, I am used to turning to
Cosmopolitan
magazine or its glossy equivalents. Spain, however, has the august Instituto Nacional de Estadística, the state-run National Statistics Institute. So it is that, between sips of
café con leche
from a small glass that burns my finger-tips, I am informed that the
instituto
has discovered the following: more than one in four Spanish men under forty-nine have had sex with a prostitute
during
their lives, while one in seventeen have done so over the past year. ‘Both figures are noticeably higher than those observed in other surveys in Europe,’ the investigators comment. The
instituto
did not dare say it directly, but it was calling Spanish men the most enthusiastic brothel johns of Europe. Could that be true?

I looked around the bar, with its varnished, cork-tiled walls and strange 1970s decor. I wondered idly about the people here. Which of the men was a brothel regular? Could it be the blue-overalled painters and decorators renovating some apartment in our block?
Was it the insurance-salesman type, frowning over his copy of
El
Mundo
? Could it be the old man with the small moustache,
leafing
through the conservative
ABC
newspaper? Or would it be the chain-smoking ‘intellectual’, one eye on the National Geographic documentary showing on the television set perched high above the door, the other watching the nurses file in from hospital for breakfast? And what about the nurses, or the elderly, carefully made-up ladies who gather here to swap tales of ailments and operations while updating their oral births and deaths column on the barrio. Were their husbands, boyfriends, sons or brothers brothel-goers? Did they care? Did anybody? Should I? Did the
instituto’s
figures say anything about Spanish society? Or was this another bizarre, even prurient, subject that only an
anglosajón
would consider interesting? There was only one way to find out. It was time to let some neon into my life. I would have to visit one of those gaudily lit
clubes de alterne
, the brothels that dot Spain’s main highways.

Which is how I ended up at El Club Romaní, a huge, neon-lit pile of granite and slate – half French chateau, half Galician
country
pazo
– in an industrial estate beside the motorway running south from Valencia. This was my first-ever visit to a brothel. I was trying hard to remember that the only way you could shock a certain type of Spaniard about sex was, well, by being shocked by it. So, as a young man in a black leather jacket and a friendly, wrinkled old doorman showed me around, I adopted what I hoped was a worldly, nonchalant personality.

I had spotted these clubs before. Who could miss them? Lit up with multi-coloured displays of neon, they shout their presence out loud. Newcomers wonder what these fanfares of pink, red, green and blue light that they see up and down Spain’s highways mean. Spaniards, however, know that much neon can mean only one thing.

I am not sure what I was expecting, but it certainly was not this. It was early afternoon and the club was still empty. We had
wandered
through the bar area and into a small corridor. A sliding door had been pushed aside and I was staring at a large, round
bed covered with a bright yellow bedspread. Some colourful,
crocheted
cushions and stuffed scarlet love hearts were scattered on it. Circling the bed was a sort of padded crash bar. In fact, lined up below the erotic prints on the walls, there were a whole variety of bars and handles. Some were recognisable as the sort that elderly people put in beside their baths so they can haul themselves out of the water.

‘This is the room that has been adapted for
discapacitados
, for the disabled,’ announced the man in the black leather jacket,
half-proud
, half-amused. There was an en suite bathroom, with a ramp into the shower. The toilet had all the bars and extra bits a disabled person could hope for. But the
pièce de résistance
was
sitting
in the corner. ‘This is a very special wheelchair,’ black leather jacket, a former Moscow correspondent for a Spanish newspaper group turned PR man for brothel owners, explained. ‘You press a button and it stands itself, and whoever is in it, almost upright. That means they can go to the bar and have a drink too,’ he said, chuckling.

I was not sure whether to believe this. The room, I thought, must be a publicity stunt, something mocked up to win a bit of sympathy for his boss’s trade. But then the old man piped up. ‘In the old days we had to carry them upstairs to the bedrooms in our arms,’ he sighed. ‘It was hard work. It was pretty humiliating for them, too.’

What is interesting about Spanish brothels is not so much that they exist, but that they are so blatant. This, in turn, reflects
Spanish
attitudes to them, and to sex. Where
anglosajones
, for example, would be shocked, Spaniards are blithely indifferent. The
instituto’s
findings provoked no commentary – and no debate – in Spain. Newspapers reported, and then immediately forget about them. As an experiment in contrast, I ran the figures past a class of New York University students who I taught on a Masters’ course in Madrid. ‘Gross!’ came the unanimous reply from the front-row women. A wide ocean, clearly, separates one idea of sexual morality from another. In fact sex and morality are two words that a certain kind of Spaniard does not think should be
uttered together, especially if other people’s sex lives and other people’s morality are being discussed. This did not mean Spaniards were wild sexual inventors. The American postgraduates would have won hands down on real experience if they had been
compared
to Spaniards of the same age. The
instituto’s
own figures confirmed that.

Before coming to the Club Romaní, the PR man had taken me to see José Luis, the lawyer for the brothel owners’ association that employed him, at the headquarters of his private security firm in Valencia. The lawyer had a Franco-era Spanish flag behind his desk. He was an
ultra
, a Spanish right-wing extremist.

Mariló, a Spanish prostitute, joined us. A single mother and former squatter, she was twenty-nine years old, cheerful and chatty. Mariló was introduced as the spokeswoman for a prostitutes’ lobby group, though it looked decidedly as if the group had really been formed by José Luis, who fed her lines. Mariló is, in fact, one of the minority of prostitutes in Spain, fewer than 5 per cent, who are actually Spanish.

‘What I really want is for people to stop looking down at me and treating me like a
bolsa de basura
, a rubbish-bag. It is time people recognised that we provide a social service,’ she said. Mariló was convinced of this last point. She adopted the professional lingo of the social worker to explain it. ‘We help get rid of
depression
and stress, and we help people communicate. Those are important things.’

The social-worker jargon slipped, however, when she mused on the only way to stop men going to prostitutes: ‘You would have to cut off their
pililas
, their little pricks.’

Mariló knew exactly why she was doing this. ‘It’s a way of
getting
money. Who else is going to pay my daughter’s nursery school?’ she asked. ‘I am not exploited. If anybody is exploited, it is the men. We exploit their sexual desires for money. And if anyone fails to show me respect in the bedroom, then they don’t get it. I am the one in charge.’ Occasionally, however, she expressed doubts about her career choice. ‘That’s because you lack self-esteem,’ José Luis told her. ‘Yes, it must be,’ she answered.

The association, José Luis wanted me to know, did not consider its members to be running
burdeles
, as brothels are properly called. It was called the National Association of Owners of ‘
Alterne
’ Places. He gave me a glossy magazine listing its members, places with names like S’candalo, Kiss Club, Falcon Crest and Hotel Elvis.

The clubs, he said, were places men went to
alternar
. The verb itself was a clue to the ambiguity with which the whole topic is treated in Spain. We struggled to come up with a definition. José Luis offered ‘
trato y amistad
’, ‘socialising and friendship’. It was such a uniquely Spanish word that I later looked it up in the
dictionary
of the Real Academia Española, which has the final word on the Spanish language. The Royal Academy, in a long-winded definition, said it was actually the women who were practising
alterne
as they ‘stimulate clients to spend money in their
company
, thereby obtaining a percentage’.

Whatever the exact definition, ‘
alterne
’, José Luis insisted, did not mean buying sex. Up to two-thirds of clients were only after a drink and a scantily clad woman to listen to their opinions, laugh at their jokes or make them feel attractive. ‘It is easy to calculate, because you may sell 1,200 tickets at the door – but only get 400
subidas
– goings-up – to the rooms,’ said José Luis.

Mariló explained that the sex side of the game normally
followed
a heavily over-priced drink or two, for which she got a commission, and some chat. ‘I am told that in northern Europe things are much colder. The clients come in, point to a girl and they are off. Here, at least, you get a bit of conversation,’ she said. It somehow seemed very Spanish to put talking on a par with sex, even if both were paid for.

José Luis admitted that the confused nature of the law, which banned people from making money off prostitutes but did not make selling sex illegal, effectively allowed prostitution to
flourish
. Spain, he said, was probably the most permissive country in Europe (though Germany and Holland may dispute that). It even attracted sex tourists to clubs along its borders. ‘There is a lot of legal
nebulosidad
, haziness, and therefore there is great freedom … Prohibition would turn off the neon and bring in the mafias,’
he said. In fact, the mafias moved in long ago. Most of Spain’s more than 2,000 clubs are not members of José Luis’s association. An indeterminate number are in the hands of mafias and pimps who ‘own’ immigrant girls.

The association’s members had got around the law on not living off prostitution by only charging the girls ‘rent’ on the rooms they used. ‘These are hotels. They provide rooms for the girls, who work for themselves,’ Jose Luis said. ‘No laws are being broken.’

Reliable figures on Spanish prostitution are hard to come by. A Civil Guard report in 2004 counted 20,000 prostitutes working in clubs in a geographical area that contained 38 per cent of the Spanish population. It was, the same report said, twice as many as in 1999. José Luis claimed that
alterne
and the sex industry turned over 18 billion euros a year (and could, potentially, pay 3 billion euros in tax). That seemed a wild exaggeration. With just over a third of Spain covered by the Civil Guard report, however, and many prostitutes working the streets or out of city apartments, this is obviously a huge, and lucrative, business. And lots of people share in the bonanza.

A few hours later, after black leather jacket had scared the living daylights out of me in his powerful Audi, we were in Sollana, the small town that boasts El Romaní as one of its major businesses. This is where Valencia’s industrial suburbs meet the countryside. A Ford car factory, turning out Fiestas, Focuses and Kas, lies not far away. Around the corner, swallowed up by the industrial units, lies a tiny, well-cared-for, yellow-painted chapel dedicated to the Virgin of Aguavives. The industrial estate gives way to orchards of fruit trees that stretch out towards the old rice fields and wetlands of the Albufera, the large lake that runs up to the Mediterranean seashore.

In the car, the PR man told me of a minor-division football team from Albacete, which was saved from bankruptcy by shirt sponsorship from the Night Star, a local brothel. ‘One of the bonuses for not being relegated was a night at the club,’ he
confided
. Some
alterne
clubs were a key part of the local economy.
One former health spa with a chapel for celebrating ‘weddings, christenings and first communions’ had become a club called ‘Madam’s’. It was said to contribute 30,000 euros a year in
municipal
taxes to the frontier town of Capmany, in Catalonia – enough to employ a road-sweeper or two. Some clubs in Galicia, he said, even managed to get local mayors to the openings.

The only legal problems the clubs got, he said, were raids from Labour Ministry inspectors. They shut the clubs down for a day or two and fined them up to 6,000 euros per girl. I never
properly
understood why. If
alterne
was a confusing word to define, then the laws that ruled it were, quite simply, crazy. On the one hand, it was illegal to make money off prostitutes. On the other, it was not illegal to have them working in your club. Then again, it was wrong, according to the Labour Ministry, not to give them proper work contracts. But giving them work contracts would, formally, mean making money off prostitutes. The law meant there was no straight answer to one of the questions I was asking myself. Was Spain formally in favour of (or, at least, not against) prostitution, or not? Perhaps, I thought, nobody wanted the
question
asked, or dared take a public stance on it.