Seville
Old Sevilla is a small circle of a city. Wondering if I might meet myself around any corner, I wandered, walking everywhere--through the Barrio Santa Cruz, along the river, across the Isabel Bridge. I examined the obvious: the bullring, the Torre de Oro, the Maria Luisa Park, the Royal Palace, the Koran stretched out on its chiseled walls. In front of the cathedral were the caselas, the horse drawn carriages for tourists. I patted the horse’s noses, fed them sugar cubes so I could feel their wet, soft mouths, then kept walking. I learned every crack and narrow passage between buildings, those ubiquitous slipping-through spaces that pedestrians had created for themselves. I sat and rested in the many little plazas with no names, and only twenty steps across (I counted them). And I checked out the bodegas, at least one to a block, sometimes several. Always dark, always with the constant low sound of unimportant arguments over a famous guitarist or dancer, and someone singing flamenco to the four walls.
That is where I learned that Sevilla is flamenco, and the duende no mystery.
In Sevilla, flamenco starts up on street corners, or in bars with a couple of guitarists, a singer, a dancer. It is men and women sitting at night on wooden chairs on the sidewalk clapping the rhythms. In mom and pop markets, old men sing their grocery lists. At Christmas time, "Oh Come All Ye Faithful" has a flamenco beat.
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