It had been another long morning, and it wasn't getting any warmer in the damp, tin-roofed warehouse where 11 members of a Gypsy flamenco dance troupe and I had been holed up for the past four hours. The drizzly November day was about as inspiring as the grim alley outside-a rutted, desolate lane in an industrial section of Seville that sensible outsiders know to avoid-and our rehearsal hadn't been going particularly well. So much for the glamorous life in sunny southern Spain.
In an attempt to raise our spirits, I decided to slip out and splurge on a take-out lunch from a little hole-in-the-wall around the corner. Returning triumphantly with a steaming pot of arroz con pollo, I realized to my irritation that I'd completely forgotten about plates. I rushed to the restaurant and came back five minutes later only to find the dancers hunched over the pot, digging in giddily with their spoons. An earthenware jug filled with tap water was making its way around the circle, and the pungent smell of garlic, tomato, and saffron floated on the chilly air. Juan, our guitarist, waved me over to the group. "We don't need plates," he told me with a grin. "We're Gypsies. We make do with what we have."
Juan's words came back to me again and again during the four months I spent in Seville that fall. Whether they were banging out music with spoons on a beat-up tabletop or devising costumes from a bin of flea-market clothes, the Gypsies I worked with were models of resourcefulness, able to make do-and, indeed, to thrive-regardless of the limited means at their disposal.
Beyond that obvious trait, though, there was much about my new friends that remained a mystery to me. Centuries of persecution have taught Gypsies to hide all that is precious and meaningful to them, and their society is as tight-knit and closed to outsiders as any I've encountered. Even after spending years producing a Gypsy flamenco company, as a paya, or non-Gypsy, I have found it nearly impossible to penetrate beyond a certain level of gitano culture.
And so I've come back, three years later, to give it another shot. In addition to working my connections in the music business, I'm hoping to gain access to the Gypsy world through that other supposedly universal language—food.
There may be no better time to see Gypsy culture on display than during the Feria de Abril, a spring festival that began as a livestock show in 1847 and today celebrates Andalusian agriculture, flamenco, and horsemanship—three aspects of regional tradition to which Gypsies have made major contributions. The fair takes place two weeks after Easter and, following as it does several days of somber Catholic pageantry, rolls out an unrestrained celebration of what I've always suspected is the true faith of Sevillanos: The cult of themselves. And why not? This city, one of the most charismatic on earth, is a place of exuberance and emotional extremes that's known not just for its flamenco dancing and bullfighting but for its zesty cuisine and seductive, dark-eyed women. It's not for nothing that the composers of Carmen, The Barber of Seville, and Don Giovanni all chose to set their operas here.
On the first day of the fair, I meet up with some old friends at midnight to see the customary illumination of the entryway arch. Paper lanterns are strung up in every direction, and the pounded-earth streets are an explosion of color. Aristocratic dandies parade on thoroughbred horses as olive-skinned girls sewn tightly into ruffled gowns clack through sevillanas, the homegrown dances of the city. Counts and heiresses hold court in their private hospitality tents, or casetas (of the 1,000 or so tents at the fair, almost all are reserved for dues-paying "associates"), and nonstop eating and drinking are the order of the night.
We visit the casetas that will have us, engage in some sevillana dancing of our own, and sample all manner of golden pescaito frito. Whole anchovies are crisp and fresh, chunks of red mullet are marinated in pungent adobo, and tiny octopus and squid rings are dredged in sandy flour and crisped in olive oil. Afterward, we slake our thirst with Manzanilla Sherry straight from the barrel and with rebujito, a faddish concoction of Manzanilla and 7-Up.
By 3 A.M., I'm totally exhausted. I collapse at one of the wooden tables in the Gypsy enclave (where any paying customer is welcome) and soak up the fairy-tale atmosphere of cascading lace and red ribbons. Old Gypsy women are hawking sprigs of rosemary and red carnations, drunken tourists are attempting to decipher the offerings (meatballs, serrano ham, Manchego cheese, marinated olives) on the chalkboard menus, and slumming Valentinos are cruising the tents, on the lam from their upper-crust casetas.
In front of the tent, five or six raven-haired women with squalling babies astride their hips are swirling long sticks in cauldrons of burbling oil set over coal-filled barrels. They're making buñuelos, the puffy, sugar-dusted doughnuts that Seville's Gypsy population has sold at the fair for generations. Sitting there in the jacaranda-scented air, sampling the sweet rings with a dainty cup of thick, black chocolate as the aching cry of Camarón, the greatest of all Gypsy flamenco singers, erupts from the loudspeakers, I'm so overcome by a wistful sentimentality that I feel emboldened enough to reach out to my hosts.
A girl with the tawny skin, layers of gold jewelry, and dazzling hazel eyes that exemplify Gypsy beauty strikes me as relatively unintimidating, so I hesitantly approach her. When I ask if she might share the recipe for buñuelos with me, she turns pleadingly toward a gentleman with an open shirt and gold crucifix—a relative, I assume—who proceeds to rise from his huddle of smoking companions. "No Gypsy would ever tell you that," he says with a beguiling smile. "It's a secret."
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.
On the last day of the fair, I take a final stroll through the streets and find myself again in the Gypsy enclave. It's midafternoon, and the casetas are just opening for business. A woman wiping off tables gives me a warm smile, so I wander over to chat. Her name is Josefa, she tells me, and tomorrow she will make a traditional stew for the caseta workers. The ingredients will include the obligatory wild mint and fennel, along with pig knuckles and chicken feet. "We put in those special things the payos don't use," she tells me with a wink, "and it makes our food better." Since we're on the subject of Gypsy cooking, I tell her that I've been trying to learn the recipe for buñuelos, to absolutely no avail. She rattles it off so quickly that I barely have time to write it down.
"I thought that was a Gypsy secret!" I say, amazed at my good luck.
Josefa just wrinkles up her nose and laughs, shaking her head with a gentle mocking gesture. It strikes me then that although I've probably spent more time in the Gypsy world than most payos, I still know little of its inner workings. Gypsy Seville remains a place of mystery to me, a realm where what I think is true turns out to be false, and where even the nature of secrets is a guarded secret. I know I'll always be an outsider here. But for love of flamenco and of arte, I also know I'll keep coming back.