“Sooo…do gypsies ever marry nongypsies?” I asked my class at the ministry.
“She want marry a gypsy!” Antonio declared to the class.
Everyone started shouting out at once, “No, Nellie! Keep away from gypsies! They are bad for you! We don’t want lose our teacher!”
“No!” I said, trying to make myself heard over their protests. “I don’t want to marry a gypsy. I’m only curious. And it’s ‘wants to.’ ‘She wants to marry a gypsy.’ Third-person singular,” I said, trying to use grammar to reestablish my authority.
But they weren’t buying it. I’d been asking too many questions about gypsies for it to be just idle curiosity. Every class I’d come in with different queries about how and where they lived. My class wasn’t stupid. They were on to me.
I had convinced myself that my gypsy stalking was really part of an informal anthropological study I was doing of this intriguing race of people. I was like one of those explorers who discover a tribe in the Amazon and observe their customs. Except that my Amazon was the capital of Spain, the trees were the apartment buildings of my neighborhood, and their huts were rent-controlled apartments in El Rastro. But who was I kidding? I wasn’t happy observing them through my imaginary binoculars and jotting down field notes. I wanted in. I just didn’t know how I was going to get there.
That night I walked home slowly through the old part of Madrid. I loved walking back after my last class of the day. I didn’t care if it took me an hour or more; each time I tried to take a different route, wandering down little lanes and alleyways. Getting lost is the best way to get to know a city.
Tonight I stumbled upon a street I’d never taken before, and as I walked along the pavement, I heard music coming from inside a bar. I stopped at the doorway where a bouncer stood. I could hear the sound of a guitar and someone singing flamenco.
The sound made my heart skip a beat. Only in Spain could I turn a corner and find myself on the doorstep of a new flamenco adventure. The sign above the door said LA SOLEÁ. I’d heard people talking of this place but hadn’t known where it was. The bouncer gestured for me to come inside, so I walked up the worn stone steps, between the iron gates, and into the bar.
The place must have been hundreds of years old, and the low stone ceilings gave it the feeling of a cave. Someone had told me that the old buildings in this historic part of town were originally used as dungeons in the days of the Inquisition. Now the stone walls were covered in black-and-white photos of all the famous flamenco artists who had frequented the bar over the years.
I stepped in through the doorway of the room where the music was coming from. It was filled with low tables and little wooden chairs where people sat over glasses of red wine, watching the musicians in the corner. An old flamenco singer dressed in a suit and a polka-dot tie leaned on a walking stick, which he picked up and banged into the floor every now and again to mark compás.
I looked around for a place to sit, but I couldn’t see an empty seat. A waiter with a tray of drinks beckoned me over and pointed to an empty space on a wooden bench next to a man he introduced as Juan. I heard the waiter tell Juan to keep an eye on me. I was confused by this. Did I need someone to look out for me? What kind of place was this? Looking around the crowd, I noticed a lot of long black hair and gold jewelry. Was this a gypsy bar?
The guitarist started to play a bulería, and I joined the bar in clapping compás. I noticed Juan watching my hands as I clapped. In his early sixties, he had slicked-back gray hair and wore a polo shirt under a leather jacket. I met his eye and he said, “Muy bien,” then turned his attention back to the singer.
The waiter brought me a glass of red wine and Juan offered me a cigarette, which I declined. (Though it did occur to me that I might as well smoke my first-ever cigarette, because with the amount of smoke there was in the bar, I would passive-smoke a whole pack by the time I’d finished my drink.)
The singer began a new song in a different style, and I switched palmas to match the new compás. I caught Juan watching my hands again. He seemed surprised to see a foreign girl who knew her compás. When the song came to an end, he ordered me another glass of wine and asked me where I was from and what I was doing in Spain. When I told him that I had come to dance flamenco, he stared at me incredulously. He told me that I didn’t look like a flamenco dancer, and I tried not to feel insulted by that.
He asked me where I was studying and looked impressed when I said the Amor de Dios. I didn’t mention that I hadn’t taken a class in weeks. How could I explain to a stranger that I was broke and living on a diet of white rice and leftover fried banana until I could scrape together enough money to go back to dance class?
I heard the sound of raised voices at the door and looked around to see what the commotion was. The waiter left his tray on the bar and went quickly to join the bouncer at the door. I asked Juan what was going on, and he said it was probably a group of gypsies trying to get in.
“You don’t need to worry about this place,” Juan told me. “They only let the good gypsies in here.” Ha. That was interesting. I looked around again at the crowd. There were dozens of dark-skinned and dark-eyed men in blue jeans and suit jackets. Gold and silver rings glinted in the light as they clapped compás for bulerías.
So these were the “good gypsies.” The respectable gypsies. The well-heeled and well-behaved gypsies… The other gypsies couldn’t get in the door. The loud, unpredictable gypsies weren’t welcome. So where did they go? I asked Juan and he told me they went to a place called Cardamomo. “Where’s that?” I asked. He looked at me a long moment, then told me that Cardamomo was no place for a girl like me.
That was all I needed to hear. As soon as he spoke those words, I knew that I had to find this place called Cardamomo where the bad gypsies went. I wasn’t sure what I would do if I did find it. I liked to imagine myself walking in wearing a red dress and ordering a shot of something on fire, but I doubted I would actually have the courage to pull it off. I’d probably be better off setting up gypsy surveillance in a cute café opposite, preferably one that served muffins.
The singer switched to an up-tempo rumba, and the gypsies cried “Olé!” and stamped their feet and clapped their hands. Two Spanish girls got up to dance. They twirled their arms above their heads and swished their long hair. I could count the days since I’d last danced flamenco, and a live guitar and a gypsy singer were all I needed. I got to my feet and stamped my boots on the tiled floor and danced until the guitarist strummed the final chords of the song.
• • •
I fell in love with La Soleá that first night. It gave me a place to go where I could live flamenco, and it made the loss of my dance classes easier to bear. I started going almost every night, and every time I walked in Juan made space for me on the bench and the waiter would come over with a glass of red wine. Juan and I would sit there until the early hours of the morning, clapping compás, and every now and again he would nod his head and say, “Bien, Australiana.”
I gradually came to realize that Juan was a gypsy stalker just like me. He chuckled to himself about the way they spoke, trying to translate their idioms to me. He’d discreetly point out a particularly eye-catching pair of pointy-toed loafers with oversize buckles, or a massive solid-gold pendant, or some other eccentric gypsy accessory. It became a game between us to spot the most outrageous gypsy fashion.
So even though I wasn’t going to dance class, I was getting a different kind of flamenco education. Juan filled me in on who the singers were and let me know every time an important gypsy walked into the room. And so began a most unexpected friendship. With Juan I laughed more than I had since I’d arrived in Madrid. No matter the day I’d had, if I’d had to wait an hour in the rain for a bus or arrived late to class, I’d forget all about it when he put a glass of rioja in my hand and told me a joke that he’d heard from the gypsies.
I put him under strict instructions to call me if any famous flamenco artists showed up in La Soleá when I wasn’t there. Sometimes I’d get a call from him past midnight when I was already tucked up in bed. He’d hold up the phone so I could hear what was going on and tell me he was ordering me a drink. I’d be out of bed in a flash and halfway up the street before he’d even hung up.
Every so often someone would walk in off the street and give a performance that I knew I would remember for the rest of my life. It wasn’t always something showy, though there was no shortage of show-stealers—gypsies who would jump up and sing their hearts out and dance a bulería. But sometimes the moments that gave me goose bumps happened at a quiet time in the early hours of the morning. Like one Friday at three a.m. when a man came in off the street with his boyfriend. The boyfriend was upset about something; perhaps they’d had a fight or an anniversary had been forgotten. To apologize the man sat down next to the guitarist and began to sing a flamenco love song.
I’d never before seen anyone ask forgiveness by stepping off the street into a flamenco bar and singing a love song in front of a crowd of strangers. There wasn’t a person in the room who wasn’t moved almost to tears, and I sent up a silent prayer to the universe that one day someone would do something that beautiful for me.
Anything could happen at La Soleá. Famous stars could walk in at five in the morning, and often did. This was no incentive for me to get an early night. In Madrid the weekend starts on Thursday afternoon and ends sometime around two p.m. on Monday, so Friday morning is generally a write-off. I’d already learned that teaching English. Often my Friday morning student, an auditing director at an energy company, didn’t show up at all, but I still had to go out to his office. Sometimes I slipped his grammar book into my handbag on Thursday nights, so that if flamenco magic did take place, I could stay out all night and get a coffee with the guitarist when he finished work at six a.m. before going straight to the train.
Of course, the body will get the rest it needs whether you like it or not. The sound of the doors closing on the metro was my cue to fall into REM. Somehow my subconscious kept track of the stations I passed and woke me up when it was time to change trains. Falling asleep in class was a bigger problem. It seemed that there was no amount of coffee that would keep me awake through an hour and a half of English grammar. But if you asked me to choose between phrasal verbs and gypsy bars, what kind of a choice is that?