Ghosts of Spain (27 page)

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.’

Serrano, however, has not gone back to jail since he left it half a dozen years ago. Nor has he got hooked on cocaine or any other drug. He is not interested in travelling, even if that means he can never expect to have a proper career as a singer. ‘I like my home. I like being with my family,’ he says. A gypsy man who can earn enough to keep his family going, without working too hard, still gains respect from his peers and family. By those standards, Serrano’s voice has been a success. And that is impossible to begrudge.

Persecution and jail have been part of the culture of Spain’s gypsies almost ever since they first crossed the Pyrenees in the
fifteenth
century. They arrived in groups of up to a hundred each led by a man using the title of count or duke. Often they claimed to be pilgrims, or said they had been expelled from their former homes by Muslims. In fact, this was the final stage of a slow migration over five centuries in which they had crossed Persia, the Middle East and Greece after leaving India several hundred years earlier. Their skills with horses and, it is said, their music, meant they were initially welcomed. But, like the Jews, the Moors and the Moriscos, the gypsies were ordered out of Spain. They stubbornly refused, however, to budge. The first expulsion order came in 1499, signed by Isabella and Ferdinand, the same Catholic monarchs
who had thrown the Jews out seven years earlier. Camarón de la Isla, like his brother Manuel, had a Star of David and a crescent moon tattooed together above his right thumb. This was, the latter once explained, meant to be a symbol of the shared history of persecution of Jews, Muslims and gypsies in Christian lands.

Over several centuries Spain’s gypsies were repeatedly ordered to change their ways, stop using their language and stop even
calling
themselves
gitanos
. They were threatened with expulsion, with galley-slavery on the Spanish treasure galleons and with transportation to the New World.

But the gypsies, who were largely sedentary from early on and sometimes based themselves in so-called
gitanerias
in or beside major cities such as Madrid and Seville, simply never obeyed the expulsion orders. They also roundly ignored the commands to ‘mend’ their ways. One royal order explicitly excluded them from the right of avoiding arrest by seeking refuge at a church altar. The Inquisition had its turn with them too. The Church was
especially
worried about gypsies who married their cousins. In 1745, Fernando VI succumbed to a strange fit of ‘enlightenment’
thinking
and had them rounded up en masse. Some nine thousand were sent to jail.

Gypsies were, as now, widely blamed for things they did not do. In
The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes and His Fortunes and Adversities,
a sixteenth-century Spanish novel, the hero asks whether a group of bandoleros are ‘all gypsies, from Egypt’. The answer was a resounding no. ‘They were all clerics, friars, nuns or thieves escaped from jails or convents,’ the anonymous author wrote. The worst ‘were those who had left their monasteries, exchanging a passive life for an active one’.

Not all was hardship, however. Gypsies have always had their patrons, supporters and defenders. These included lords, priests and ordinary folk ready to stand up for ‘good gypsies’ and protest or intervene when the entire community was punished for the sins of a few.

The roguish British bible-seller George Borrow, who wandered Spain in the 1830s, was just one of many travellers to fall under
their spell. He even devoted a book to them,
The Zincali, or an
Account of the Gypsies of Spain
. Others, he noted, were similarly captivated. These were ‘individuals who have taken pleasure in their phraseology, pronunciation, and way of life; but, above all, in the songs and dances of the females … In the barrio of Triana, a large
Gitano
colony had flourished, with the denizens of which it is at all times easy to have intercourse.’

Borrow can be taken with a large pinch of salt, but his
description
of the moment a gypsy wedding party starts dancing in a room piled three inches thick with sweetmeats gives an idea of the wildness of
juergas
past. ‘In a few minutes the sweetmeats were reduced to powder, or rather to a mud, the dancers were soiled to the knees with sugar, fruits and yolks of egg. Still more terrific became the lunatic merriment. The men sprang high into the air, neighed, brayed, and crowed; whilst the
Gitanas
snapped their fingers in their own fashion, louder than castanets, distorting their forms into obscene attitudes, and uttering words to repeat which were an abomination.’ Yet, still he loved them.

Those old gypsy protectors and enthusiasts have their modern equivalents. They include the social workers of the Tres Mil and those of the jails. There is something deeply attractive about the naivety of some gypsies, about their simple, yet historic, refusal to sign up to the modern world. Those who have won their trust were, I found, highly protective of them. Then there were the legion of
payo
flamenco buffs. These were often the first to say that, although there are many great
payo
flamenco singers, you could not do it properly unless you had gypsy blood in your veins. Access to
duende
, the mysterious, magical force that inspires the best flamenco, was, I was told, available only to true gypsies.

Gypsy-chasing was not the exclusive domain of absolute monarchs, however. General Franco ordered the militarised rural police, the Civil Guard, to keep the gypsies under control,
specifying
it as a task in the force’s 1943 code. The generalísimo’s regime patronised what some people have, only half-jokingly, referred to as ‘
nacional flamenquismo
’, a folkloric accompaniment to the ‘
nacional catolicismo
’ ideology of his regime. The popular
copla
,
which many flamenco artists turned to, was the radio music of the regime. Franco, in short, was happy to see the spotted shirts, tight waistcoats and the broad Cordobese hats of what might be described as musical-hall gypsiness. There were no lack of gypsies and other artists prepared to play ball. Spain’s gypsies have always known how to adapt. It was under him, though, that the gypsy families were cleaned out of Triana.

Despite all this, the Spanish gypsies’ culture and social
structure
, already different from other gypsy groups around the
continent
, held strong. They remained stubborn, sometimes rebellious and always proud. They saw off, in short, every threat that came over the horizon, except drugs.

Gypsy culture is slowly being diluted. Some gypsies are now unrecognisable from other Spaniards. Life expectancy, however, is reported to be almost ten years lower than for other Spaniards, while only 1 per cent of gypsies go to university. Traditions remain strong. The checking of a bride’s virginity by searching for blood on the sheets used on her wedding night is still practised by some. The gypsies kept their own laws and, until recently, still turned to their own elders, the so-called
tíos
, or uncles, to mediate in blood and honour disputes. But the rise of drug barons, gypsy
politicians
and, some say, evangelical pastors, has shaken their
authority
, if not the respect with which the elderly are still held. The
tíos
often established frontiers between competing groups so that they should not need to sort out questions of honour by turning to violence. It is something prison governors are still careful to do.