Sights

You could’ve dubbed it borderline seedy too easily. A tavern by night in high-summer, tourist-pleasing Andalucía. Somewhat lustred with olive oil, sweat or maybe tears, the dark wooden panelling and handrails of short flights of stairs to snug little corners, here and there in the bustling smoke-cloaked interior, bore witness to countless Mediterranean dinners, hot nights and hotter encounters. The kind of place where vintage-film macho picks up fiery waitress and gets mighty slap on cheek right back (turn-of-the-century Latin flirting). Where great dames like Chavela Vargas or Spain’s own “La Faraona” started their dazzling careers.

Not that I knew any of that. I was quite young and tired. We’d played that night (Enescu’s 2nd Rhapsody, perhaps) in one of those quaint plazas: a youth orchestra from the East receiving fondly the good-humoured ovations of the vecinos del barrio. Now we’d had dinner, it was around midnight, the partying in full swing, the chattering in fortissimo, and I was trying to make my way through the excited crowd, to take a breath of starry air, outside.

Before the exit, though, I came across a pool of silence. It was in front of the bar counter. People had made room. Locals. They’d stepped back and were standing there quietly. Solemnly? I had to stop. Someone started clapping rhythmically and a voice let out a musical wail, gitano-style. And then two men appeared in the middle of the oasis. Neither tall nor very slim, wearing nothing special, looking not unordinary, looking at each other, eye to eye, forged together as if by a beam of invisible steel, and so they started dancing. Rather, their feet went deftly through the tapping, stepping and halting, their hands carved vigorously midair cries of adoration or else fine despair, their torsos pulsed, arched and rotated around the sheer axis of their eye-to-eye bond. I knew dancing, and that wasn’t it. That was a universe of just two planets interlocked in mutual gravity - I saw love.

Since then I’ve gone back to Spain (a country having the uncommon gift of making wonders happen in the middle of the street) several times. Two years ago, on a side door behind the stage in Seville’s Flamenco Museum there was a poster of famed bailaora Cristina Hoyos. Her gaze engulfed you, eyes charged with that same quiet, steady magnetism. As per 2010, flamenco is part of the UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. Intangible; easily vanished unless stored properly: in our hearts.