Sunday, November 23, 2003

I wrote with pen and paper, scrawled notes from fingers used to typing the thoughts as they flowed. I wrote on the bus and in the hotel. I miss my Palm Pilot.

But first, I will catch up and then will put down what I wrote in the bus. We went to Morón on Saturday, after spending the morning in Triana with Paquito, Pilar and Solea. Saturday morning Freddie had a guitar class with Paco. When they finished, Paco drove us to Triana where we met Pilar and Solea and bought a small painting of La Piriñaca, an old woman Gypsy singer from Triana, long dead. After that, we ate at a beautiful old tapas bar in Triana, Las Golandrinas (the swallows), which is beneath a former apartment of Paquito’s. I believe I might have eaten at that bar in 1999, but this time I have the name and address: Bar – Las Golondrinas Tel: 954-331-626, Antillano Campos, 26, Triana, Sevilla. I think if I checked my old Spain notes, I would find it written from our first trip here together. Las Golandrinas has beautiful, old Spanish tiles, “azulejos”, on the walls. The wooden chairs and tables are hand painted with bright colors in designs that are “muy” Sevillana. They remind me a little of Mexico and I am well aware, seeing that connection, that Spain conquered Mexico. I wish we had had the camera with us. The house specialty at Las Golandrinas is “champiñones”, grilled mushrooms with a delicious thick white sauce flavoring the middle. But they don’t serve coffee.

After our outing in Triana, we returned home briefly, to get our little suitcase and to walk past the Jardines Murillo park to El Prado San Sebastion station to catch the bus to Morón.

But now, to go back further … we have been spending a lot of time with Paco and Pilar. Last Wednesday was Pilar’s thirty-eighth birthday and we celebrated that day with her parents, brother and sister-in-law and Omar and Sabar at Paco and Pilar’s house. Pilar received three beaded purses, all the rage here, and one beautiful one was from us. We also gave her a beige hand embroidered mantoncita because she wears beige a lot.

Last Thursday after I practiced, Paco and Pilar picked us up and we went to Triana. Omar, who was feeling a little better then, came with us. Saba, who was again feeling a little under the weather, was sleeping. The night before, at Pilar’s birthday party, Freddie had arranged with Pilar’s father, Andres Dominguez the guitar maker, to work in his shop with him. So the boys went to the shop and Pilar and I went shopping. She needed to exchange a coat her parents had given her that was too big. She was also returning the large beaded bag that her mother had given her. I ended up buying a cheap three quarter length black acrylic coat/jacket with fake fur at the collar like the white coat Pilar was returning. It zips up and is very warm. It is like Freddie’s black coat that he got at the flea market, only mine has fur, and it too only cost twenty-five Euros. Then Pilar showed me her favorite jewelry store, owned by a friend of hers, and I, who didn’t need more, bought some beautiful earrings.

After that, I changed shoes and we walked across the bridge and all the way to Corte Ingles because Pilar wanted to exchange something she had bought for Solea. But she had left her wallet in the car and so didn’t have the receipt with her. But we had a wonderful time window shopping and talking. That is the farthest I have walked this year. I took it slowly and my ankle was OK.

When we returned to Triana the boys were having coffee and/or beer in a little café. Andres had finished work and had gone home. Omar called Saba, who was not in, and then we left for home.

Friday I took Saba to see Juana’s one o’clock class and then I returned later to practice at two thirty. Rubina joined me and the two of us together accomplished a lot. We worked on steps and contras and had a lot of fun. It felt great. I am skipping my practice this weekend because of Morón and also because my leg is cramping again. I need to stretch more as well as to rest it.

Rubina is returning home on the tenth too (like we are), but on British Air. Freddie had a Toshi appointment on Friday and then Omar and Saba came over and cooked dinner. Omar was still very sick.

Saturday morning Omar and Saba took off early for Morón. They were going to meet us at the Gran Hotel Morón, where we had all made reservations.

I wrote by hand, with pen and paper on the bus on Saturday: “On the bus to Morón, Freddie, me and Luisito. Luisito will perform at La Peña los Gallos tonight in Morón. It is pouring rain outside, and although before seven PM, the night is black. I am so tired I just want to sleep.

Luisito decided to take the bus with us, as he wanted to arrive earlier than Juan del Gastor and Lucy, his ride there and back. In this rain we were glad to be going by bus instead of by car.

Manuela Carrasco’s strikingly beautiful daughter, Zamara, is sitting behind Luisito and Freddie. She looks just like her mother Manuela, one of my very favorite dancers. Her long, dark hair is pulled back and her dark face is glamorously made-up. Zamara will sing tonight at the Peña. She is sitting next to her light haired, chubby little girl friend, Rosario Amador, who will also sing tonight. They are both listening (with two sets of earphones attached to one minidisk player) to something obviously Flamenco. They are studying cante, perhaps what one of them will sing tonight. Freddie does palmas quietly for a while with Luisito. Then Luisito sings softly. They are sitting together, across from me. Zamara snaps her fingers, lost in a world inside the minidisk, known only to her and her friend. Now she is doing palmas and singing softly. Freddie chats with Luisito.”

Freddie and I took a taxi from the bus stop to our hotel and Luisito walked to the Peña. Omar and Saba had never arrived. We wondered if they had gone on to Granada, a former plan of theirs. The Gran Hotel of Morón is like an elegant palace just outside of town. Everything is very beautiful, with guilded antique chairs, wooden tables with curved legs, Oriental rugs, mirrors, paintings, and a sense of tranquility.

When we were ready to go out, they called a taxi for us and the driver was a Flamenco aficionado. He had known Anzonini and Diego. We arrived early at the Peña in order to set up the video camera and the tripod. Luisito had asked us to videotape and he had arranged the permission with the performers and the Peña.

The Peña members were warm and welcoming to us. The walls were covered with photos of great Flamenco artists who had performed there. They told us later that they had archives of three times as much as they could put on the walls! The first half of the show was an old man, Paco Comacho, who sang accompanied by a young guitarist. He was good and his last song, a Toná, brought tears to my eyes, although the older man behind me told me that Paco didn’t sing it as well as usual. Then the man behind me, sitting next to his quiet but smiling, short haired wife, started to tell me about the past, about forty years ago when the Americans flocked to Morón to study with Diego del Gastor. I told him that many of those people were our friends. He talked about Anzonini del Puerto, also an old friend of ours, now, like Diego, long dead. He started to identify the photos on the walls. There were a number of Anzonini from when he was younger than when we knew him. Then the second half of the show started.

Rosario sang first. Rosario, Zamara, and Luisito were all accompanied by Dani (Daniel) de Morón, a young up-and-coming guitarist. Dani is already well known and well respected here and I think many people came to hear him. Rosario, who had seemed so quiet in the bus, sang with a strong voice and had great stage presence and did a little dancing between cante lines. We enjoyed her. Then Zamara sang and danced a little too. She was strong, but I couldn’t help comparing her to her famous mother! The girls are about twenty or twenty-two, according to Luisito. Then came Luisito’s turn. He was the featured performer. The girls did palmas for him, as he did for them. The audience loved him and his old Lebrija style. In the finale the girls danced and sang again.

At the intermission Saba walked in. They almost hadn’t let her in until she said she knew us. I hadn’t realized that this Peña is a more closed community than some. Saba and Omar had arrived in Morón that afternoon, as planned, but Omar had a fever. Instead of taking a taxi to the hotel, they found the Hostel (pension) Morón and stayed there instead. The man who helped them find the hostel knew Agustin Rios, a guitarist/singer nephew of Diego’s (from Morón) who has lived in California for many years. He is a good friend of Freddie’s and Omar knows him too (so do I). So Omar connected with Morón. After caring for Omar all day and getting his fever down, Saba walked to the Peña and joined us for the second half of the show. She loved it. She had been wanting to see good Flamenco since she arrived.

After the show the man behind me and I decided that with these young people carrying on the tradition, Flamenco will continue to live!

One of the people in the audience was an older short-haired blond woman wearing long, pink rhinestone earrings and a sequined and beaded pantsuit. Her vacant looking husband kept her supplied with hard alcohol while he drank juice. Then she came up to us and started singing. Her voice was strong and she knew many many songs, including one Rubina sings. She sang to me, she sang to Saba and to Freddie and then to Juan del Gastor. Saba and I were entranced. Freddie videotaped her. Later, Luisito told me that Salvadora, the woman, is eighty years old. I wouldn’t have guessed that. I thought she was in her seventies! Salvadora told me that she could have been a great artist but that instead she had married and had children and become a housewife.

We saw Pepe de Morón there with his girlfriend whom I had met last year at La Carboneria when Freddie was still in the hospital. She has an American father and speaks perfect English. They would love to come back to California. Pepe (Pepito) was the other dancer who came to California with Farruquito and Juana Amaya this last year. He also came to California with Miguel Funi the year before. So he has visited our house twice now.

As we left, after we had called the cab, we watched a fiesta start to happen in a large building next door without a door. Pepito invited and encouraged us to stay but we were both feeling tired and it was cold and rainy outside. I was fighting getting sick and so was Freddie but we didn’t know it then. Freddie even left his new baston in the Peña. I called from the hotel that night and arranged to pick it up the next day. Luisito told us Sunday that the fiesta had later moved inside the Peña and had lasted until five AM.

The next morning Freddie was sick again. He doesn’t have a strong enough immune system yet to hang out with sick people, so he succumbed to the sickness again. He is sleeping now as I write. I feel a little sick too, but am still trying to fight it.

This morning, when we went by the Peña for the baston they told us that a man had taken it home, but not to worry, that it was not lost. They told us the man’s last name and approximately where he lived. The taxi driver, the same aficionado who had driven us both ways last night, helped us look for the house. We asked people and by pure luck we finally found the house. The man’s daughter answered the door and Freddie heard the man grumpily telling his daughter where it was. Freddie thinks the man wanted to keep it. But Freddie got it back, thanks to the taxi driver’s help. If you are ever in Morón and need a taxi, call this taxi company: Pepe’s car rental and taxi twenty-four hour service: 95-485-06-65 or 95-485-17-37 or cell phone: 608-33-92-57 or 699-19-75-22. He charged us three Euros less than the first taxi we took from the bus when we arrived (and the distance was the same). And he was very nice and very Flamenco. As I wrote before, he knew Anzonini and Agustin and, of course, Diego del Gastor too.

We waited for the bus at a delightful bar in front of the bus stop, (calle Fray Diego Cadiz N. 149) where the waiter, Lorenzo Sanchez, knew Agustin too. Lorenzo is from a Flamenco family and told us he loves it when foreigners come who also love Flamenco fanatically! We also talked to an American ex-service man there who had married a Spanish woman and stayed on in Morón.

And I forgot to mention how we discovered more ways American tax money is being squandered by the military. Staying at this luxury hotel in Morón, the Gran Hotel Morón, for more than three months already were a number of American service men who looked like they did nothing but drink alcohol and chat with the hotel staff all day. A number of officers will stay there too when the remodeling begins at the base (in Morón) soon. But right now, these “regular” service men are put up in a luxury hotel. They begin to drink before noon and seem to have nothing to do. We American citizens are paying for it! Why?

And now on to another subject, Rebecca is in the hospital, the same hospital where Freddie nearly died last year, Virgin del Rocio. Rebecca fainted the other day and Alfonso got scared and brought her to the hospital. They still haven’t figured out why she fainted, but she seems to be very anemic and still has trouble walking. Alfonso and his mother Esperanza have been there with her every time we have called. Concha called her from Switzerland to help give her moral support. Today the hospital phone was busy for an hour so we called her on her cell phone, thinking that perhaps the hospital phone was out of order. But Rebecca was on the other phone with her sister in America. (Alfonso took our call). Rebecca has a lot of support and that is very good. We can’t visit her unless we are well, of course. But we remember when she and Alfonso came numerous times to visit Freddie in the hospital last year, and it moved us very much. We want to return that support. So now Rebecca, still in her twenties (and too young for this), is in the hospital herself. It is scary. Hopefully they will let her out soon. Alfonso stays there every night and won’t leave her side. That too is very touching for us.

Monday, November 24, 2003

I still have a sore throat this morning and an upset stomach. I went to bed with the sore throat and hoped it would be gone by this morning. We are out of the Wellness Formula we take to ward off sickness and have been trying Spanish formulas that mix Echinacea, bee pollen and vitamin C. I don’t want to be sick. Freddie’s pain medication from America arrived Saturday but there were two months worth of Oxycontin and no Percocet (not obtainable in Spain), which he uses for his breakthrough back and foot pain. I think his sickness might be withdrawal from the Percocet, but he says that his mood is too good for withdrawal and that he is just sick. Both of us have stomach upset too. It is pouring rain outside.

This morning Freddie says he only has a cough left, with phlegm in his chest. I feel hot and tired and have this sore throat and stomach upset.

Monday, November 24, 2003 Evening

I took a group class from Juana Amaya tonight at six. She said it would be slower, but I thought it moved pretty quickly! I rested all day because I felt sick but Freddie and I went together and he played guitar for the class. I am glad I went, and I signed up for the week. She worked on Solea and Bulería and her ten-year old daughter was in the class too. Juana is a very nice person and I like the things she showed us. But my mind had to really focus to keep up with all the material she gave us in that first class! And most of the class members were really good, including Seiko, one of Torombo’s best students. She is the one with the lightening fast feet!

Rubina just came over and I put oils on her aching back. The horrible knots in her muscles went away and she felt better. Then I took a pre-arranged client call from America. My clients can’t wait forever! I have had to write letters from here for two different clients, but I do it because it is important for me to be there for my clients. I haven’t really dropped off the face of California! I was just gone an extra month!

SPAIN CHRONICLES 2003

Sept 14 – 15 Writings
Sept 17 – Oct 4 Writings
Oct 5 -12 Writings
Oct 17 – 20 Writings
Oct 25 – Nov 2 Writings
Nov 4 – 9 Writings
Nov 11 – 17 Writings
Nov 23 – 24 Writings
Nov 25 – Dec 2 Writings
Dec 5 – 8 Writings
Dec 10 – 14 Writings