World Travel Guide Online

Chasing Gypsies
Barcelona, Spain

Guitars in the Gypsy ghetto

Every Spaniard I met had warned me about Gitanos, the Iberian Gypsies. Consensus had it that they were shameless thieves, first class cons, hopeless junkies, and brutish barbarians, not to mention stinky and rowdy marginals. All urged me to save my naïve little self a lot of unnecessary trouble and stay away from them. Of course, I didn’t listen.

El Moreno froze half way through his guitar stroke when I showed up, cutting short a most skilful flamenco rendering. His chicos – a posse of dark young men sporting multiple golden earrings – turned half a dozen red-eyed stares my way. Loosening his grip on the guitar, El Moreno leaned back against a urine-stained wall covered in graffiti, his fierce blue gaze burning a hole right through me. He expected an explanation for my lone trespassing into his territory.

Trespass in a Gypsy ghetto? Me? Never. I had been invited.
Well, sort of…

A week earlier I had met Monica. She and her cousin Rocío were begging for small change in the subway. In pure Gitano fashion, they did so quite loudly, singing at the top of their lungs and clapping their hands improvising a surprisingly pleasant and lively tune. Monica had a deep, powerful voice and was strikingly attractive – a 21^st century Esmeralda with unforgettable green eyes.

I reached into my pocket and handed them four times more than what they were asking “for a phone call.” While Rocío left to make the call, I decided to miss my train and hang out with Monica a little. I felt she might have a few answers for me.

“So, hum, you’re a Gypsy right?” I inquired, with the little time I had for diplomacy.
“¡Como no, paya! No shit, white girl!” she barked back without looking at me.
“Where did you learn to sing like that?” I continued.
“My sister taught me,” she replied flatly, her eyes never leaving the subway turnstiles, on the lookout for her next prey.
“How about your mother, can she sing too?”
“No, she’s old already,” she mumbled, uninterested.
Yet after a short reflection, Monica turned to me with a smile. “But she used to be good, very good, you know. Que sí, she recorded tapes when she was young.”

Monica was 13 years old, ten years younger than she looked. Her clothes were fashionable, but they might have been the only ones she owned. I got the impression she had been living and sleeping in them for weeks. She talked to me in that rough, careless Gitano accent, unbothered by a thin lock of dirty black hair that stuck stubbornly to the corner of her mouth. I could smell alcohol on her breath and a light stench about her; that very stench I had learned to associate with this people to whom it supposedly made more sense to use their bathtub to grow vegetables than to bathe.

“I’d like to learn more about Gitanos. Where can I find them?”

Monica’s big green eyes stared at me blankly for what felt like hours. I wasn’t sure whether she thought I was the dumbest paya – a term used by Gypsies to refer to any non-gypsy female – she’d stumbled upon, or if her brain was so fried she needed this long to process my question.

“San Roque,” she finally answered, letting her jaw hang down after the final “eh”, as if it were too much trouble to close her mouth after she spoke.

“San Roque?” I echoed, hastily scribbling on the first scrap of paper the bottom of my purse would produce.

“Yeah, there’s a bunch of them there. You take a right coming out of the subway station, y ahí están, and they’re right there,” she explained.

“But, hum, a lot of people have warned me about Gitanos. You know, they say they can get dangerous with strangers. Do you think I could get in trouble?”

Monica stared at me some more while I got myself psyched to take in the wave of insults I expected she was preparing.

“¡Joder! Hell, even I get in trouble with Gitanos, they give me problems too,” she simply replied without accusation. “Es así paya, hay gitanos buenos y hay unos que te mandan a la mierda. See, there are good Gypsies and there are bad ones, and that’s just the way it is.” she concluded after another short reflection.

Cousin Rocío came back from the phone booth and gave me a distrustful look. Why was I still here? I tried to explain, but she was too drunk or doped to understand or care. It was time for me to go, Monica had told me what I wanted to know and the girls had some more begging to do.

“So estación San Roque, you said, right?”
“Eso. That’s right,” she confirmed before taking off with Rocío without goodbyes.

“Oh, but Monica, just… where do YOU live?” I called out over the noise of the incoming train. She turned around and stared at me one last time from the other side of the turnstile. “San Roque,” she yelled back unimpressed, as if this were the ultimate self-evidence.

And so, a week later, I stood in the San Roque ghetto before El Moreno who had yet to take his silent stare off me. The pungent smell of marijuana filled the air as the chicos took turns sucking on a communal joint. The big boulevard behind me was completely deserted at 2:30 on a sunny Saturday afternoon. Not a single soul around except for these guys and I. Nowhere to run and nowhere to hide. But also nothing to lose.

“I’m looking for a girl called Monica,” I finally said. “Long black hair, green eyes, very green eyes, 13 years old, pretty…..”

After a long heavy silence, as if someone had just turned his power switch on, one of the chicos walked right up to me. “And what do you want with her?” he asked, pumping his skinny chest.

“She’s a friend of mine,” I said without flinching, yet keeping a close watch on the shadow of my nose, “she told me I could meet her again in San Roque.”

The chico stepped back and exchanged a few clueless looks with the rest of the posse. “You’d stand a better chance of finding her at the mall!” he finally wisecracked, triggering a general round of laughter.

“You see the red scooter out there, well she lives in the building right in front of it,” El Moreno offered in an unsuspected bout of helpfulness.

The chicos went back to their music and singing and I pushed on towards the scooter. All of the building’s doors were locked, and I just was not going to start buzzing everyone there asking for “Monica”. Not that I was really counting on finding her anyway. She was my excuse, and my excuse had worked so far. I kept on walking to explore the ghetto, or “barrio” as it is called in Spanish.

Gypsy barrios – essentially seedy, overcrowded concrete compounds – are the sadly successful outcome of the Spanish authorities’ assimilation crusade. Some twenty years ago, Iberia’s last rebellious nomads were crammed into sterile apartment buildings which, in the rough hands of these former tent-dwellers, quickly fell prey to accelerated decay.

The San Roque barrio was therefore a rather typical one. It took up an entire block and consisted of dozens of residential buildings laid out around a cobbled courtyard lined with trees and stone benches. Dirty, rained over laundry hung from most windows, there were lumps of freshly spit mucus and dog doo practically everywhere and urine stains on every other wall. After a careful inspection, I sat down on an isolated bench, next to an abandoned grocery cart.

A few feet away from me, two young children were bouncing a ball against a suspiciously stained wall, perfectly oblivious to my intrusion. It struck me how distinctively East Indian these children’s features looked. This was no coincidence.

Gypsies, I later learned, are also called “rom” (free man) and have been associated with the dom Indian caste. They are believed to have abandoned their native Punjab around the year 900. Linguists have even traced back the origins of Romani – the traditional Gypsy idiom – to Sanskrit, and uncovered shared features with modern Darvinian languages such as Hindi, Bengali, and Panjabi.

Gypsies would therefore have arrived in Persia in the 11^th century, continuing their migration in small groups to various European countries, settling in Spain around 1425. It amazed me to think that, nearly 600 years later, Gitanos were still completely alienated mostly because they had retained much of their traditional beliefs and way of life.

I left the children to their games and made my way back to the center of the courtyard. Two guys from my greeting party were still taking turns doing wonders with the battered communal guitar. As I came closer, El Moreno jerked his chin forward at me, in a friendly “what’s up” kind of way. All I could think of doing was smile. He smiled back but without looking at me, tuning his guitar.

Monica wasn’t here. But I could stay.

A tall and skinny newcomer with a crew cut, two earrings, and a leather jacket came to accompany El Moreno with a second acoustic guitar. The chicos just stood around, sucking on yet another joint.

“You like Flamenco?” El Moreno asked me, expecting no answer. A wink and two nods later, his buddy-cum-cousin-cum-neighbour La Matralleta and him were treating me to a sublime acoustic guitar double act that would have put the Gypsy Kings to shame.

The chicos accompanied the duo’s performance with rhythmic hand clapping. Together they sang a loud, well rehearsed traditional flamenco tune with all the passion they possessed. Their coarse, powerful voices echoed off surrounding shabby apartment buildings and flooded the empty streets of the barrio.

And so El Moreno had just admitted me to the ghetto, with the full authority of the eldest son of the San Roque clan’s chief.

Little by little, I was introduced to each one of the chicos. El Moreno (literally ‘the dark one’), was ironically the fairest of them all. The other player was Francisco “la matralleta” (shotgun), apparently christened so because of the speed at which he played the guitar.

Then came the Antonios: El Gordo (the fat one), El Flaco (the thin one), and the lady pleaser who introduced himself as Corazón de león (lion heart), to which el Moreno promptly replied “yeah sure! Corazón sangriente (bleeding heart) is more like it!” All of them were closely or remotely related in some way.

El Moreno (far right) and the chicos

I noticed a little tube of contact glue that they kept passing around. My first judgmental thought was that they sniffed it. Shame on me. It only served to harden their long nails, as they all played guitar with their bare fingers. To that effect, Francisco commented he couldn’t play quite as well these days as he had broken his thumbnail.

“You guys are incredible. Do you ever play on La Rambla (Barcelona’s main drag and a haven for street performers) for money or something?” I couldn’t help asking El Moreno.

“No, tocamos p’a nosotros. We play for ourselves,” he replied almost with disgust. “See, unless someone hires us to play in a bar, we don’t play outside the barrio. You wanna hire us?”

I giggled like a fool. He played another tune.

And another, and on it went all afternoon, as the chicos treated me to an endless repertoire. Dozens of children gradually joined us, mostly young girls, and danced all afternoon amidst cheers, laughter, and endless music.

Music is a Gypsy’s life blood. It flows through their veins and beats in sync with their heart. It’s the solution to everything, the reason and the explanation for it all. It gives words to sorrow and colour to life. And so for hours I stood under the bleak winter sun, marvelling at these little Gypsy girls’ every move. In cheap, tacky sweat suits, they were the most graceful and riveting dancers I had ever seen.

Luckily I had brought along my camera and thus happily snapped away all afternoon, much to everyone’s delight. The chicos eagerly posed for me, and the flash attracted a flock of little girls begging to have their picture taken. Me, senora, me, take a picture of me! Please, me with my friend! Senora, me and my sister! Me and my cousin! Me, me, me….

Alas, I ran out of pictures and darkness fell upon San Roque. On the way back to the subway station, the girls tried to teach me how to clap my hands the Gypsy way. Five year old Loli was much better at it than me, yet she and her friends patiently coached me until my swollen hands could take it no more. “No one ever taught you how to clap your hands?” little Sara inquired with great concern.

Looking into her puzzled green eyes, I remembered Monica. “Where did you learn to sing like that?” I had asked. What a silly question. All Gitanos sing like that.

To be continued…