The following day, I skip the fair to pay a visit to my old friend Antonia Martinez. Though she, too, is technically a paya, she grew up so surrounded by Gypsy culture that she has become what you might call an honorary Gypsy. A former flamenco dancer whose lovely teenage daughter, Marina, is now training in the profession, Antonia is also a renowned cook. While I'm visiting, neighborhood women yell up from the street below to ask her what she's making. Today it's puchero, a richly flavored stew of chickpeas, minted broth, and an array of mysterious-looking meats and bones.
"Gypsy food," Antonia tells me, "is basically the same as the food of Seville's poor." Like so many Andalusians of her generation, Antonia grew up destitute. The meals she existed on, she says, were always made, like those of the gitanos, in a single pot (the extent of an itinerant Gypsy's kitchen) and relied on fennel and mint, herbs that grow wild and free for the picking in the countryside, as well as on scraps of meat—chicken feet, trotters, and pigs' ears—that wealthier people tend to discard. After we've soaked up the last of our puchero, I thank Antonia for the meal. "What else could I offer you?" she says with a shrug. "My cooking is all I have to give."
It may be the only thing Antonia has, I think to myself, but she certainly gives it her all. Like much of the food you encounter in Seville, my friend's cooking is characterized by a certain alegría, a palpable sense of joy. You see this exuberance in the food itself, as well as in the faces of the people who prepare it. "I put my heart into my cooking" is a comment you'll hear again and again, as are "This is a labor of love" and "Her cooking really has arte."
This last term, which means far more than its literal translation, "artistry," can convey, connotes everything that is soulful and tender, creative and clever, in a people that has survived for hundreds of years by its wits alone. In a region with a history of relentless poverty, iron-walled class divisions, and rampant prejudice, it has always been this arte, or personal flair, that has made Gypsy life worth living. (Another Gypsy friend of mine, who grew up amid meager surroundings with 12 siblings, once answered my question about what he ate as a boy with the following anecdote: "My mother would take a loaf of bread and rip off three chunks for each of us. 'This is the meat,' she would say. 'This is the vegetable. And this is the bread.' She was a woman with tremendous arte.")
All of this is perfectly in keeping with the one thing I do know about when it comes to Gypsy culture: flamenco. Though there's an ongoing debate about where the style comes from, only the Gypsies have elevated flamenco to the status of a religion. While some dancers here may not know how to read or write, they invariably know everything there is to know on the subject of flamenco.
Most of the company I worked with in Seville lived in a housing project called Las Tres Mil Viviendas. Nicknamed "El Bronx," the area is notorious for its drugs, unemployment, and violence (and for the fact that most taxi drivers refuse to go near it). But there are bright spots in Las Tres Mil Viviendas: Amid the addicts slumped against graffiti-scrawled walls, you'll see old men singing as they lovingly brush their donkeys. Guitar strains often echo down the dingy hallways. And every once in a while, a youngster from the neighborhood makes it big as a musician or dancer. Flamenco is the pro basketball of the Gypsy projects—the impossible dream that occasionally comes true.
Because Gypsy flamenco is, at its core, fueled by poverty, loss, suffering, and survival, it has a wildness that distinguishes it from the polished precision of the more theatrical shows. Its success depends on the ability of the dancers to tap into this wildness and incorporate it into their performances. I'll never forget the time my company was auditioning for a group of prospective backers from New York and managed to find this liberated streak only after several lackluster numbers. When an investor inquired as to what had changed, one of the dancers told him, "Before that last song, we shared a tomato and looked into each other's eyes." The backer cocked a skeptical eye, of course, sensing a Gypsy scam, but we knew she was telling the truth. Flamenco is a question of limbering up the soul rather than the body, of opening the way for duende, the black spirit of inspiration.
My friend Pilar Montoya knows this as well as anyone. Better known by her stage name, La Faraona, she is one of the daughters of the late El Farruco, perhaps Spain's most famous flamenco dancer. Watching Pilar in a small film called Bodas de Gloria, or Glorious Wedding, helped further shed light on the concept for me. In the movie, she plays la juntaora, the matchmaker who is charged with testing the bride's purity using a white handkerchief. The practice, common to this day among old-fashioned Gypsies, designates a wedding as either "glorious" or its opposite: "canceled." And it underscores what is perhaps the most widespread myth when it comes to Gypsy culture—the myth of its sexually liberated women. I would argue that it is in part this repression that's responsible for the abandon so typical of Gypsy flamenco.
As she opens the door of her small basement studio and presses her baby-smooth cheeks against mine, I'm reminded why Pilar is known in flamenco circles as "three hundred pounds of pure arte." I watch as she takes a seat in front of a class she's teaching, shouts "¡Asa!" and unleashes a torrent of clapping, her hands a mad blur before her face. The students explode into motion. That the pocket of air between two bare hands should generate so much sound, energy, and rhythm reminds me once more how Gypsies, beginning from absolutely nothing, create the most glorious arte.
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