Ghosts of Spain

by Giles Tremlett

  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.

  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:

  The bell for silence has rung already/Now they order quiet/And when the bell rings again, mother/They will tell us to get up.

  When I was in prison/All I could
do to pass the time/Was count the rings/That made up my chain.

  Flamenco has dozens of styles or types of song, known as palos. They have all been carefully categorised and placed on a ‘family tree’. These are sometimes reproduced in flamenco books as just that, though no two trees seem to fully coincide. The tree’s roots are buried somewhere in the eighteenth century or earlier. The palo families appear along its branches. Here are the rumbas, tanguillos and alegrías, the songs of partying and dancing, or the complex siguiriyas and soleas. There is even a branch known as the ‘palos de ida y vuelta’, the ‘round-trip palos’, brought back from the Americas by musicians who travelled west to the long-disappeared Spanish empire. These last ones bear the names of Latin American musical styles such as milongas, tangos, and guajiras – though they often bear little relationship to the Cuban, Argentine or Mexican music of the same names.

  The origins of flamenco are lost in history. That does not stop the cognoscenti, a passionate, opinionated and nit-picking bunch, from spending much time disagreeing on them. The Romans were said to be fascinated by the dancing girls of Cádiz, though they predate flamenco and Spanish gypsies – by centuries. Records show gypsy dancers from Triana being hired for parties in the 1740s, though they were also generally deemed to be pre-flamenco. Early nineteenth-century travellers would watch fandangos being danced. My preferred version of the story is of a series of musical forms brought by the gypsies in their exodus from India and their slow crossing, over several centuries, of the Middle East and Europe. They crossed the Pyrenees into Spain in the fifteenth century. They were noted musicians whose services could be bought for weddings and celebrations. Spanish culture was itself a melting pot at the time, with Arab and Jewish music adding to a stock of romances, traditional poetry, occasionally set to music. Flamenco, it seems, emerged from this stew over the centuries – appearing in a recognisable form in the early nineteenth century. The rhythms inherited from all sides, be they the metre of medieval poetry or the beat of Indian music, created what is, at times, an extraordinarily difficult structure. It is not, and never has been, a purely gypsy music. Some of the best exponents have no gypsy blood at all in them. Gypsies, however, have always been at its centre.