Sunday Morning, La Dehesa

A jerrybuilt jumble, so shoddy, diminished; just cubes of grey concrete with windows and doors. It started to crumble the day it was finished. Franco’s “solution” for gypsies and moors. It’s called “La Dehesa”, the pasture, the grange. The old ones say once there were orchards here, too. It’s undergone quite a formidable change: there’s nothing but concrete obscuring the view. Like rabbits in hutches we live in our flats, with neighbours on both sides, below and above, surrounded by dustbins and children and cats, and noises of squabbling, noises of love. Each Sunday, some woman (I can’t tell you where) starts singing, as morning creeps in through the shutters. Flamenco, like woodsmoke, just hangs in the air, and laps over drainpipes and outlets and gutters. She’s clearly a gypsy. I can’t say I’ve seen her, but singing is thoughtless, as easy as breathing, and something about her, her aural demeanour, is caught in her song, which comes seeping and seething through windows and clothes lines, as if by osmosis. She sings for herself. She’s not grabbing attention. There’s no petty ego. Aesthetic hypnosis is selfless. Seduction, without condescension. She sings of her pain and her ecstasy. Both can be borne on the air, like a children’s balloon. Her art is unconscious, leguminous growth, yet as hauntingly lovely as the light of the moon. Gitanos, gitanas – delinquents and whores. Well, maybe – but, seeing those ravishing eyes, or hearing The Song as it wavers and soars, I know in my soul where my sympathy lies.