Somehow, you can live in a place for months and fail to meet a resident ghost. After five months in Granada, Spain in 2003, I was well-acquainted with Lorca. I’d read a bilingual edition of Poeta en Nueva York before I’d arrived, and once there, would spend many a Sunday afternoon, and other random days, losing myself in the park named for him. Every day I crossed that bridge by the plaid-skirted girls’ school, where the stone posts on either side of the Río Genil bore lions’ faces and manes, and a stanza of his poetry. I took a flamenco guitar class in the Albayzín, would walk down that street with all the teterías, perhaps stop for a pot of jasmine and a hookah in the light bulb-lessness, where the menus read “Open at dusk, until the candles go out.” As I’ve previously mentioned, I saw adaptations of his plays, concerts at the hall named after his friend Manuel de Falla. Couldn’t visit his grave because he was assassinated and tossed in an unmarked hole in the ground by, I imagine, the same kind of maniacs you can see depicted in Pan’s Labyrinth, especially the colonel with his face slashed, whose self-made unreality far outstripped that of the fantastical girl protagonist (I am indebted to a colleague, the late philosopher Tom Christensen for this last point).
I knew Lorca after that season, from a brisk January–when snow fell in the city for the first time in twenty years and melted just as quickly, as if the cameras whipped out in every plaza caused the temperature to rise back above freezing by late morning–to a perfect May, full of lazy days on the pebble beaches of Almuñecar, a silent town, and scraping by in Nerja, living on baguettes and peanuts and the occasional actual meal like squid ink paella, as the euro grew stronger and stronger against the once stalwart dollars in my bank account. The ghost I somehow missed, even though I took the bus to his Cádiz for carneval, even with all the flamenco all around me, was Camarón de la Isla. My conversation instructor Rosa had even introduced us to what I heard as a perfect, and profound, party song in “Volando Voy,” but I never looked further into him. Sometimes, it simply isn’t quite time.
The next year, when I returned for five weeks, Camarón caught up with me. Over calamari and Alhambra beer my host mom played the magnificent—there is no word sufficient to it—album Lágrimas Negras, a recent collaboration between flamenco singer Diego “El Cigala” and the Cuban genius pianist Bebo Valdés. My host mom’s niece raved about it at lunch, promised to burn me a copy, and played some of it. Immediately, “Bien Pagá” caught my attention because it is probably the most catchy on the album. It wasn’t until I really began listening to it in headphones that it broke my brain. Each song had so much resonance; I felt that someone with more literary and dramatic skill than myself could have scripted a silent film from it, an entire, and entirely satisfying, love story with a different scene for each song.
As if songs like “Nieblas del Riacheulo” and the fire-filled “Vete de Mi” weren’t enough, the track list concludes with the bossa nova standard, “Eu Sei Que Vou Te Amar.” Caetano Veloso himself reads a poem, “Coração Vagabundo,” during a bridge (the previous winter, a girlfriend had bought me a copy of his Best of, the beauty of which I was just beginning to recover from). Of course, I had only been shown the tip of the iceberg—my host mom eventually said “If you like this, you have to listen to Camarón. He’s the greatest. His ‘Como El Agua’ is one of my favorite songs.” I remembered his name faintly from hearing “Volando Voy” in class the year before, so I walked 15 minutes to a Corte Inglés, no, it was the bookstore on Gran Vía de Colón. I bought a three-disc anthology of Camarón songs, Alma Y Corazón Flamencos.
After a little over a month in Granada, I took buses and trains and long walks and cabs up to Lyon, France where I was to study French for two months. Along the way, I met hip hop heads from Sweden traipsing across Europe through Erasmus, a German vagabond who smoked hash between train cars and taught me a few phrases in Portuguese caló, and sundry other characters. By the time I settled into my room on the fourth floor of L’Escale Lyonnaise, a dorm in downtown Lyon for students and sometime students and people who weren’t sure quite what they were doing with their lives, I was utterly entranced by Camarón. Something broke apart in my understanding of sound, something akin to when I was in Cape Town and realized that I was in both the most beautiful and the most ugly place I’d ever been. Many days, I opened the giant windows in my room, sat on the sill and leaned lightly on the crossbar that was the only thing preventing me from falling to the sidewalk below, looked out over the tops of buildings and listened to those CDs (yes, on a portable CD player with headphones…it was a different time) in a state of total bafflement.
The lyrics themselves were impossible to me, such paradoxical and, for lack of a better word, honest words on love and pain. On “Una Estrella Chiquitita,” Camarón concludes a verse with the grand but believable claim that he is so consumed with his lover, that he despairs, that if he she died he would die too. It sounds better and less trite in Spanish (“pero si te murieras me moriría”) and especially when delivered by Camarón, who can make you believe anything, even the illogical, clamorous imagery of Lorca’s poem “La Leyenda del Tiempo” when he vaults it into song. On the next verse, he begins the conclusion in the same fashion; again, he despairs, and announces “pero si te murieras me alegrería”—that he is so consumed with his lover, that if she died, he would be happy. The metric switch from anapest to iamb in the parallel lines produces an uplift in alegrería that clashes with the anguish, and perhaps guilt at the prospect of such a grim relief, in the voice of Camarón. It is possible that one day I’ll write a longer treatment of what such songs did to me that summer, and in the subsequent few years, but for now I can simply say that as I listened, on repeat, to songs like “Canastera,” I realized that there actually are no songs like “Canastera.” I had never heard anything like that before. In time, I would find resonances in the vocal power and styling of masters like Björk, especially after seeing her concert DVD recorded at the Royal Opera House. A year later, when I heard “So Broken,” on which she is accompanied by flamenco guitarists, it made perfect sense.
I’ve been to many places, but never one so thick with ghosts as Spain. The work Lorca left behind doesn’t help, patron saint of blood poems, whose body, despite a targeted excavation, still has never been found, which is all the more haunting when one considers what he wrote in 1929, in the poem “Fable and Round of the Three Friends.” The poem contains the impossible imagery that first drew me to him, with his discussion of his friends proceeding thus, “the three of them frozen: Enrique by the world of beds; /Emilio by the world of eyes and wounded hands; / Lorenzo by the world of roofless universities.” He saw so much, “saw them disappear, crying and singing/ into a hen’s egg, / into the night that showed its skeleton of tobacco,” and at the end of the poem, saw something that, when you consider his riddle of a death and robust afterlife, you just can’t shake:
“When the pure forms sank
under the cri cri of daisies
I understood they had murdered me.
They searched the cafés and the graveyards and churches,
they opened the wine casks and wardrobes,
they destroyed three skeletons to pull out their gold teeth.
Still they couldn’t find me.
They couldn’t?
No. They couldn’t.
But they learned the sixth moon fled against the torrent,
and the sea remembered, suddenly,
the names of all her drowned.”