Some of us, the newcomers, are on the outside of circles looking in, and the great trrrum of what sounds like a thousand guitars, and people who speak their mind stridently at all times with an abstract lack of investment that allows you to forgive them. And there are muted cheers in the tabanco as a thin toothless man wails his flamenco heart out and the local drunk, equally loved and rebuked, trums along on the guitar.
A gitana, beautiful, delicate laden with thick makeup, adorned in clothes dripping with sequins. She holds a cigarillo in her long-nailed claws and throws out her voice as if it had been a trial to her all her life, but one of which she is proud of all the same. Her song is a challenge, she is saying: "there you go, it’s there, is that all there is to it?" And as she starts, her face is soft but the more she sings the more her face takes on a stage grimace, her voice holding the violence and terror of the in-between-moments where she shushes and projects gravel shouts to dim the noise. To guard the art. And I see her in the arms of a man who you wouldn’t think belonged to her by the toilets. He has a closed, inward-looking face. His eyes dart around. She has had it up to here with it all, but to him she gives completely – her spindly limbs bending under the arte and indignity of it all. So completely a woman and holding all of what that entails in her stomach.
She looks around, challenging but looking at no one, and the man who sang comes to us with his hat out begging, pointing to the famous faces of flamencos adorning the walls, "él, mi hermano". His long-haired drunken companion confirms this sagely. The man accepts our refusal with nonchalance, swinging his hat back on his head, chattering toothlessly to his friend: that undulating Andalusian way of speaking that falls outside the window of our damp, wooden, high-ceilinged bedsit every morning: "Tomaaaaa! Manuuuuueeeee! Primooooooo!" It starts off soft, ending loud and long. I look up at the high ceiling and don't know if I'm still dreaming.
At the fiesta everything is a gentle war. You can feel the unbearably beautiful tension of fear in the air through the solemn trums and tentative trills of the party-goers. I find myself looking at the blueness and unreality of it and thinking that it could so soon and swiftly be enveloped in paranoia. So naked and vulnerable all, that the bohemians cloak their eyes and faces in a brave mask. Valientes. The brave people. I hear the word again and again, thrown about by the female cantaora. Her hands twist like small delicate tree trunks as she rolls the joint. Her eyes sink into her face as she cries into the night, singing La Paquera, Camáron, stoned, stoking up the young foreigners who came to reignite their cold hearts, in a way that the poetry of Rumi and music of Bob Dylan could not. I make a mental note of this, as I am gripped so entirely by this feeling, teetering towards paranoia, that we hold the world and the music so heavy in our hands, we could so easily drop them.
‘Los valientes’ trum and trill the night away until the music becomes a joke to mock itself, and we smile through it, and strain our faces against the frowns that threaten.
And the next afternoon in the arms of my lover, it comes to me that music is so innate to us, so vital to how we communicate, that it must be guarded properly. It is a prophet that can lift up our spirits. But then again, we must treat it like a friend, give it the silence and the rough bumps that all living things deserve. It would not be a God, but that which connects us beneath the delicate shells we are held in.