Cadiz Gypsy Flat
07.15.2009 It was a Cadiz flat with a gypsy family for a month. A room ran $500 (75,000 psts) with full board. He had a space and the family received extra cash.
Spanish gypsies left India in the 9th century. They traveled via Istanbul and Europe or through Egypt and North Africa arriving in the 15th century. Half of Spain’s 600,000 gitanos lived in Andalusia.
In 1499 Spain enacted laws intended to keep the gypsies from wandering. They were forbidden to own horses, work as blacksmiths, use Gitano names, their language or wear their clothing. They were on the outside looking in.
As a type of song, music and dance, flamenco was introduced by the Gypsies in the 18th century. The essence of flamenco is the depth of a deep song or cante jondo, a lament of the marginalized gitano. Early forms featured the accompaniment of a single hammer striking an anvil. Gypsy work.
Amelia, an overweight diabetic ate extremely fast, her unemployed husband Jasus who resembled Icabod Crane and son Jasus II, 20.
The son was a mental case; studied engineering in school played computer games and laid around their microscopic flat watching soccer on television with the volume on full blast.
His father made ends meet by selling cheap scarves on a table along chipped battered walls outside the market across from his local bar. It was a small town and everyone knew everyone. C’ la vie.
Another resident was Dortmund, a gay German flight attendant for an international airline working the South American circuit. He had a room in the apartment for a month while improving his Spanish with a private teacher. They talked from 9-12 every day.
One day in the kitchen he said, “It’s great being here, no one knows where I am and I like it like that. Nothing to do but study.” He carried a mobile.
This wasn’t exactly true. They met one day in an internet cafe.
“Hi Dortmund. How’s it going?”
“Great, I’m on-line with a boy in Germany. This is a great chat room. We’re talking about getting together when my studies are finished.”
He spent a lot of time chatting with boys on-line in Cadiz and looking at his mobile. The city was a relaxed place for his encounters with young boys at night when bars and cafes spilled people into streets and he was very happy. Spanish was the language of love. It smelled like exotic perfume. Forbidden fruit hung heavy throughout the city. Young and ripe for the picking.
The ghost’s Cadiz room was small, noisy and tolerable for completing a sentence or two and gathering digital images for future reference and creative projects.
His sentence, this sentence, was a metaphor for putting in his time somewhere in the world. He liked living on the edge. He knew if he wasn’t living on the edge he was taking up too much space. He sharpened his senses there. He’d put his time in Vietnam, Bali, China, Kuwait, Saipan, Canada, OZ, Ireland, Israel, Japan, Bhutan, Tibet and then Morocco. Part and parcel of the grand adventure called life.
In Cadiz he wrote one true sentence, murdered his darlings in their sleep when their day was down, done and out. He dispersed word garbage to wheeled curbside trash containers under the cover of darkness.
Spanish men in blue collector uniforms with yellow safety stripes rolled through at midnight. They were followed by teams of men hosing down the narrow cobblestone streets. Word flotsam flooded city grates.
An immigrant man selling liquid below his balcony sang, “Don’t be fooled by cheap imitations. Everything must go. Going out of business sale.”
Yellow street lights played on wrought iron balconies above an old man walking his creaky Labrador. Two intellectuals holding hands discussed economics in Spanish. Medical students planned future operations.
The local unemployment rate was 40%. Andalusia was the poorest province in Spain. Sexually repressed women prowled their world studying cobblestones as they walked through loneliness looking for future lovers, husbands and fathers of their countless Catholic children. Lonely heart club ads filled the paper.
Their conjecture about possibilities filled the air with hope. Young boys feeling scooter engine heat beneath them and hot girlfriend’s arms around a waist escaped their parent’s world. Zooming past pedestrians.
An old couple supported each other’s arms taking small steps toward their future. Small significant gestures of love and affection flowered. It rained flowers.
In an upstairs flat with an open balcony on the world he wrote by a single desk lamp, with Spanish jazz music a rhythm for fingers. He studied a map of the province.
After a month he was bored and visited Patricia at the tourism office to see about new places. She pointed out quiet coastal towns.
“Villages really, full of Germans this time of year. It depends on what you want.”
She highlighted areas north of Cadiz; Arcos de la Frontera and the small towns of Bornos, Villamartin, Prado del Ray. She pointed to a place named Grazalema.
“This is a national park, one of the most extensive and well protected areas in Andalusia. The pueblo has a population of 2,300 people, 146 species of birds, tracts of Spanish fir and excellent climbing. It’s a beautiful area. One of my favorites but it will be cold there in the winter.”
Her broken English was better than his Spanish. Everyone talked in broken tongues. They hinged meaning through gesture and intellectual guesswork. They attached meaning to gestures, facial expressions and vocal tone.
Orphans ate inherited soil. She took classes in the morning and did a three month practicum at the local tourism agency from 5-8 p.m. She hated it.
Her coworker, Maria, dreamed of owning a Harley.
“My dream is to graduate and move to Germany to work in the travel business,” Patricia said. “Three years in Spain doing theory and practical work is a struggle for me.”
