Ghosts of Spain Page 23
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.
Separation, however, does not always work. The flamenco workshop group in Seville jail, for example, had recently seen its numbers reduced by one. A participant, serving time for a stabbing, had returned home on his first weekend out of jail. He had immediately been stabbed to death in a bar. Everybody was convinced it had been a revenge killing. ‘It should not have gone that far,’ commented Silva, shaking his head. ‘More violence is not a solution.’
I should admit here to a long-standing penchant for some of the stranger bastard offspring of flamenco. It is the sort of stuff that sends serious-minded purists reaching for their guns. I learned to love groups such as Los Chichos, Las Grecas and Los Chunguitos when, on long journeys, I stocked up on cheap tapes and CDs at roadside bars.
These groups can only be described as the Status Quos of the flamenco world. The Chunguitos had the bad hairstyles, gold chains, medallions and 1970s dress sense of the worst of northern Soul. On older record covers they boast a passing resemblance to the Bay City Rollers. They took the simpler flamenco rhythms, especially rumbas, and turned them into electronic, urban pop. Their lyrics do not pas
s even the most basic mores of political correctness. ‘You were so beautiful that I felt a desire to kill you, because I realised you were no longer mine,’ they sing, or, quite simply: ‘Pass me the joint, I want to get stoned …’
The women in these songs are mothers, virgins, whores, junkies, whipping posts and, especially, traitors to their men. ‘Papá, don’t beat up mamá … because mamá is a good person.’ The men, in turn, are poor, violent, bitter, drugged and, often, in jail. ‘I would never have imagined/ that you might cheat on me/ my love was so blind/ that, for you, I killed,’ Los Chichos sing in ‘Mujer Cruel’, ‘Cruel Woman’.
Liking these groups is roughly equivalent to being hung up on 1970s British pop-rock, with the added disgrace of lyrics that would put the most violent rappers to shame. It is not a recognised sign of high cultural standards. They do represent, however, a moment when flamenco began to mix with the world of rock and pop – as it continues to do. Unfortunately, this new wave of flamenco rockeros were also amongst the first wave of victims of the heroin explosion. The Grecas fought so badly that one of them, Tina, eventually stabbed the other, Carmela. An emaciated, peseta-less Tina could be seen wandering the Madrid barrio of Lavapiés in the early 1990s. She went on to spend time in jails and psychiatric units before the drugs finally killed her in 1995. One of the Los Chichos, in a deranged moment, managed to kill himself by throwing himself from a first-floor window.
What these groups did was a travesty to flamenco purists. But, just as the nineteenth-century café cantantes, the coplas aflamen-cadas of the mid-twentieth century and the Catalan rumbas of the 1960s had done, they opened flamenco back out to the world. A deluge of flamenco rock and pop has followed since then. The latest generation, brought up on hip-hop, acid house or rap, is producing its own potent, rhythmic mixtures. From the flamenco-blues guitar of Raimundo Amador to the Moroccan or Berber fusions of El Lebrijano and Radio Tarifa to the eclectic rap, hip-hop and everything else mix of Ojos de Brujo, the fusion continues. Spain is virtually unique, in western Europe, in having such a strong motor of autochthonous music. For flamenco is the bright, burning force behind a flow of popular music that is recognisably Spanish.
One man has done more to popularise flamenco in the past twenty years than anybody else. He was, of course, a gypsy. His name was José Monge Cruz, better known as Camarón de la Isla, the Shrimp of the Island. The Shrimp was a man with Mick Jagger lips and one of the worst, most bouffant, hairstyles since James Brown. He also possessed the best, most tragic, flamenco voice of the past quarter of a century.
Camarón was an intense introvert – a man of profound, hermetic silences. He lived in a period when young singers, thanks to the influence of pop and rock, could become living legends. It was also a time when flamenco itself opened up, incorporating new instruments and allowing itself to be influenced by the turbulent popular culture of the 1960s and 1970s. Camarón himself would lose from this meeting, dying a rock star’s early death. Along the way, however, he ensured himself the same kind of mythical status of fellow tortured, ‘live fast, die young’ stars like Jimi Hendrix or Jim Morrison. He died in 1992. Some say that flamenco has yet to recover.
The Iglesia Mayor, the main church, stands on the Calle Real, the Royal Street, of the southern town of San Fernando. Perched on a flat ‘island’ called La Isla de León it overlooks the salt flats, muddy wetlands and still waters of the Bay of Cádiz. A plaque on the church reminds those present that this is where, in 1812, one of the key events in Spanish history took place. For it was here that a rebel parliament, fighting the French rule imposed by Napoleon, wrote the first Spanish constitution to enshrine popular sovereignty (male suffrage excluded monks, criminals, servants and those with no income). It was a time when Spain was adding new words to the international lexicon of war and politics. A new species of fighters, dubbed ‘guerrillas’, harried the French. A new political label, meanwhile, was invented for those behind the constitution. They were the world’s first ‘liberales’. Their battles with Catholic traditionalists, and the continued coup attempts, or pronunciamientos, of both sides, would dominate a politically chaotic nineteenth century but, also, bring universal male suffrage in 1891 (though elections were still manipulated by the interior ministry).
The liberal ethos of the constitution would later be betrayed by the man its authors had wanted to come back and run the country, Fernando VII ‘el Deseado’, ‘The desired one’. After winning, with the help of Wellington, their battle against Napoleon, the liberals saw their constitution declared null and void by Fernando.
In the Calle Carmen, one of the narrow streets leading down to the bay from the Calle Real, a second, more recent, important event in Spanish history took place. Here, in the shabby end of the shabbiest part of town, in a two-room house that shared a small patio with several neighbours, José Monge Cruz was born in December 1950. These were still the grey years in Spain, the years of hunger that followed the Civil War. José Monge was born at the bottom of the social and economic ladder – an Andalusian gypsy. But San Fernando, with its shipping and salt industries and its naval barracks, was relatively prosperous. And José’s father, like many gypsies, had a forge which his elder brother Manuel, eighteen years his senior, took over when the father died in 1966.
The Monges did not starve. A blacksmith was near the top of the gypsy social order. One of José’s brothers still lives in the handful of rooms where the eight Monge brothers and sisters grew up. When I visited it, the paint was peeling off the walls and the tiny, shared patio was run down and shambolic. A plaque on the outside wall reminded visitors that this was where José Monge Cruz was born and that his uncle had, because of his relatively pallid skin and his rubio, light-coloured, hair nicknamed him ‘Camarón de la Isla’, the ‘Shrimp of the Island’. Camarón de la Isla, the plaque insisted had been ‘a gypsy through and through’. He was ‘so slim that he was almost translucent … and, instead of walking, he seemed to spring from one side to the other.’
José’s mother, Juana, was a canastera, a basket-maker. After her husband’s death, however, she kept the family afloat by cleaning bars and cafés. Few of those who met Juana remember her for how she earned her money. What they remember, instead, is how she sang. Camarón’s father sang too. That early flamenco palo, the martinete, is a forge tune, traditionally accompanied only by the clink of a blacksmith’s hammer. But it was Juana who the great names of flamenco – Manolo Caracol, La Niña de los Peines or La Perla de Cádiz – would come and listen to when they passed through town. Juana’s children would all inherit some of her talent. Manuel, the eldest brother, began earning extra money by singing to the señoritos – rich men out on the town – at the Venta de Vargas, a local restaurant. But it was Camarón who, by the time he was twelve, was already the star.
I met Manuel in San Fernando’s cemetery, where he goes daily to tend Camarón’s huge marble tomb. I handed him a thick bunch of red and white carnations, a gift from two ardent Camarón admirers in Madrid. Manuel spends his time here arranging the fresh flowers that arrive continually and sometimes shooing off the fans who want to clamber up beside the seated statue of Camarón. ‘Someone turns up virtually every day. From Seville, from Barcelona, from France or Germany,’ said Manuel, still amazed at just how far his brother’s name has travelled. The Shrimp sits atop his tomb with his trademark long, curling locks – responsible for an entire generation’s worth of bad gypsy hairstyles – brushed up from his forehead and dripping down onto his shoulders. A dandy’s handkerchief sits in his top pocket. The tomb is a piece of drab kitsch. Covered with slabs of black shiny marble, mottled with brown, it looks out of place in a cemetery where virtually everything else – except for the fresh carnations and roses, the paper flowers and a handful of mangy cats – is a brilliant white.
The greatest fanatics are the gypsies themselves, for whom Camarón is, quite simply, El Príncipe, The Prince. When he was alive, gypsy women would bring their children up to him and beg him just to to
uch them. He knew the myth was going too far when that happened. ‘I don’t like it,’ he told his friend, later biographer, Enrique Montiel.
Manuel sticks my carnations in a pot, busily fluffing them up, fussing around with others that are already there. ‘The other day I found some gypsy children here. They could only be about ten years old. They must have been here selling flowers at the feria, (the local fiestas). One of them said: “I am going to curl up here tonight beside my cousin Camarón and sleep next to him.” “You can’t do that,” I said. “Nobody is allowed in here after the gates have been shut and, anyway, you’ll get scared amongst all the dead.” “I’ll be all right. My cousin will look after me,” the kid said.’
Camarón provoked a rare phenomenon in Spanish culture – public displays of gypsy pride. Entire families of gypsies would appear at his concerts and, while the payos looked on in amazement, let rip the full passion of flamenco. Fat matrons danced with beautiful, bejewelled and untouchable granddaughters. Tears were shed. The gypsy juerga was there for all to see.
Camarón’s funeral in San Fernando saw coach-loads of gypsies bussed in from around the country and scenes of mass hysteria. Fifty thousand people arrived in a town of eighty thousand. Spain had rarely seen such a concentration of its gypsies. This was not just the death of a star, but the funeral of a prince, a demi-god, a man whose voice and hands were thought to contain magic forces that came from beyond the normal world of human experience.
Enrique Montiel, a writer who came from the posher end of town, had played with Camarón and his friends in the streets of San Fernando or jumping off the town’s bridge into the river below. Enrique remembers, as a boy, drifting towards a noisy crowd gathered in a makeshift bar in the city’s old, semi-ruined Moorish castle. ‘It was where the town’s cockfights were held,’ he told me as we picked at tortillitas de camarón, fried shrimp pancakes, in the Venta de Vargas. Stars of bullfighting, flamenco and farándula, Spanish ‘showbiz’, stared down at us from photographs. A stunningly beautiful, bare-shouldered starlet with cleanly chiselled features and wide eyes turned out, to my amazement, to be Carmen Sevilla. I only knew her as the ageing television star who presented the lottery results.