Up on the Wall

Granada - Sacromonte

There were two places I wanted to visit in Granada: La Alhambra and the Sacromonte where the gypsies have been living in caves for centuries. I had fantasies of hanging out with the Gypsies. So, I took a short cut through the old Muslim quarters and started going up the hill on a small back street I thought would lead me there. I stopped when I saw street sign for a “dead end”. I took it literally, not thinking twice that it may have been directed at cars and instead made a left on an even smaller alley made of broken stairs that also went up the mountain, After walking past mostly inhabited and abandoned cave dwellings, pointing my finger at a couple of wild mangy dogs, I saw a dirt path, more of a goat path, cut up the mountain. It was seven PM and the sun was still burning bright. As I trekked up through the Dr. Seuss like cactus flora I could see the whole of Granada under me. Then, out of the dust, literally, small cave dwellings inhabited by African immigrants began to appear, trashed leather couches; water barrels for rain; a hippie couple fixing a motorcycle, and old man smoking a cigarette, traces of large bone fires…These people were out of the grid with the best view in Granada!

I came to a large fortification wall I had seen the day before from the city and thought it would be fun to climb it. It was built like a staircase for giants, maybe twenty feet high, three feet wide. It zigzagged up the mountain, ending against what looked like an abandoned church. This was Sacromonte? I got close up to the wall and noticed that someone had chiseled away pieces of stone, creating a way to climb it without superhuman powers. I secured my camera bag and went up.

The view was even more breathtaking. On the other side of the wall I could see another hill and the faint glint of tourist buses. Allright, I was not on Sacromonte after all. But what the hell, I was going to make it my Sacromonte. I decided to take a chance and follow the wall up to the top. The steps were sometimes five feet high. I took off my shirt and started climbing, quickly transforming myself into a goat. It seemed endless. The son was hot, the wind cool, the sky electric blue and the dreaded Alhambra just another dot in the distance. As I spent myself I stepped out of my goat personae and could see that there was no way of actually getting down again. Every step I took, I was going to have to take it back. And that would have been lame. So, I kept going until I came to a spot that looked like a possible descent without the risk of severe pain and broken bones. I sat down, letting my legs dangle like a child, drank some water and lost myself in thought.

When you’re down, you got to go up. And there’s nothing like climbing a mountain to remind you that you’ve got to earn the climb. And when you do, with a little blood ( I did scrape myself) and sweat then you’re back to normal. You’re not “high”, actually. You are back to yourself.

I went down the mountain and took the street with the dead end. It led to Sacromonte, the real one, and I quickly came to a small plaza overlooking the Alahmbra. The sun was setting, the palace was turning red and there was a little café bar with some tourists, children running and a stunning Gypsy man with a white gleaming pants, pointy leather shoes and an open bright yellow shirt revealing a golden cross resting on a field of thick black chest hair. His hairdo was slick and he wore golden raybans. I wanted a soda and he directed me to an older woman who asked me where I was from. I said Chile and she replied that the wife of her nephew was from Chile. Her name was Paloma and she was standing right there against the parapet of the hill.

I introduced myself. She was in her early thirties and looked like the typical Chilean woman: small, beautiful round face, a bit of an overbite and jet black hair. Except that she had a small black dot tattoed right at the base of her forehead: she was a Gypsy. After some chitchat we quickly realized that we both spoke French. She asked me how come.

The Pinochet Scholarship I said.
She looked at me weird. Never heard of it she said in all seriousness.
I laughed and explained to her that in exile, Chileans who had gotten to travel the world, learn languages and expand their universe beyond anything imaginable if they had stayed behind, called their gains the “Pinochet Scholarship”.
She smiled and said that she left Chile in 1981, when she was seven. So she had been born one year after the coup and had lived her entire childhood during the darkest days of the dictatorship. But she didn’t remember anything. She had left just in time without being poisoned. She wound up in France and that’s where her mother is. How she wound up with a Gypsy, having a child and standing here, she didn’t tell me. But she had big dreams. In the past years, Sacromonte has been gentrified to the point where the gypsies are moving out selling their cool caves to Germans and Scandinavians who fix them up and rent them at exorbitant prices. Imagine. You get to live among the Gypsies! Not for long she said. In twenty years, there will be no more Gypsies here. Only Gringos. Her dream was to go back to Chile and figure out how to build luxurious cave dwellings and sell them all along the coast. The only problem she thought was the issue of earthquakes but she had an engineer friend that could test the ground. It all sounded like total madness but I smiled and egged her on. Why not, right?

Her six year-old daughter came up with her ten year-old cousin and I gave them one of the organic lollipops from Whole Food I had brought with me for precisely this occasion. They smiled and ran down the hill to play at another house. Paloma whispered: there’s my mother in law. We don’t get along. That’s why I’m taking my daughter back to Paris. I glanced at the woman in question and got hit with the evilest eye I had ever seen. Half her face was disfigured by a skin disease and the other half looked like white glass. I felt a jolt and decided it was time to leave. I wanted to see if I could go into one of those cave restaurants for tourists where they play gypsy music. We bid each other farewell and I started walking down the hill. I quickly came up to a large cave house where I saw the two kids eating their lollipops. I stopped and asked them how it was. They smiled. I looked up and saw the sign at the entrance: Gypsy Music School. Two gypsies were fixing a generator and a skinny young woman was smoking a cigarette.

I said hello, They stopped. The younger gypsy asked me if I wanted to smoke pot, in other words if I wanted to buy weed. I said no thanks. I had smoked so much in my life it drips from my fingers, I joked. The woman asked me where I was from. Chile I said. Just like Paloma. The older Gypsy, who was the master musician said he was her brother in-law. The exchanges went back and forth and they decided they liked me enough to have one of my cigarettes and chill out sitting on the parapet. The sunset by now was stunning. A few seconds later Paloma appeared running down the hill. There’s a big fight and the witch (the mother in law) is accusing the ten year-old cousin of sexually molesting the little girl. The young Gypsy woman gets all pissed, grabs a metal bar and walks up the hill shouting that there was no way that Shit Faced Whore was going to talk like that about her little brother. (There’s no easy way to translate Gypsy insults here.). We smoked our cigarettes and five minutes later she comes back saying that the Whore is going to call the cops. The young man takes out his knife and says it’s time to get it over with. Everyone tries to stop him. He is screaming at the top of lungs that he going to cut the bitch up and feed her to his dog. Neighbors are now running to see what’s going on. Just when it looked totally out of control, everyone calmed down suddenly, just as fast as the fire started, someone pulled out a joint, it was smoked and a murder was averted.

The master musician sighed and looked at me. All I want is a meal at night and some peace and quiet. He was the most forlorn Gypsy I had ever seen.

I decided to go back to my hostel. I didn’t need to “see” a gypsy show. I had witnessed the real thing. It’s funny but Unesco has declared both the Alhambra and the Sacromonte world heritage places. You can guess which one is more alive. I had seen both and now I was ready to go to Morocco.

June 28 - out of Granada

Winding my way through the cut mountains of Andalusia, passing abandoned stations with names like “Las Maravillas” (The Wonders) and endless fields of sunflowers and golden wheat, on the train from Granada to Algeciras, the famed city at the edge of the Iberian Peninsula, the landing pad of thousands of African immigrants looking for a better life up North. I’m on my way south.

Two days in Granada. Much too much life to stop and write and actually put down words that reflect the extreme beauty of this city. Two days. It starting to feel like time is stretching out its wings. More time to through the motions of loss.


Many years ago my mother brought back from her trip to Granada a small tile with a timeless inscription: “Give him some alms, for there is no greater suffering than to be blind in Granada.” I tried to walk with my eyes closed through the alleyways of the Muslim quarters, but I didn’t make it too far. So, I just closed my eyes and tried to listen. Young tourists everywhere. English, French, German, Spanish, Arabic, a dog barks, the bells from a nearby church, the far away blast from a construction site and the music of a dead Michael Jackson playing from everywhere, car radios, shawarma shops, tapa bars. It was definitively time to open my eyes. I looked for a blind beggar on my walks through the Abayezin muslim quarters but found none. Actually I saw no beggars anywhere. I have a feeling they’ve been forcefully removed. If I were in charge of the tourism bureau of Granada I would hire actors to play beggars. They would remind us how blessed anyone is to be in the presence of a city built on intricate twists and turns like a living wooden carving from the famous palace of Alhambra. A place I had wanted to visit for a long time. Two weeks ago, I bought, on line, the last spot for the 9 AM entry to the Palace for that Saturday morning, my only full day in Granada. Ticket receipt in hand I proudly walked up to the top of the hill through a path flanked by rushing man made water creeks fed by a mountain spring waterfall scintillating in the morning filtered sun light. Wow. Magical. At the top sits the Palace. Hundreds of disappointed tourists without tickets wait in line to have a chance to visit the gardens. I waltz in and enter the grounds of the Palace.

Now, somewhere in the middle of my visit to this palace so exquisite that any “description” would be a pointless exercise in style, I found myself in the grips of an existential nausea. The kind that grabs you and tells you it’s time to leave. It’s a slippery pressure point that wont let itself be captured by rhyme or reason. Any attempt to try to put it aside, makes it worse. Nausea is like virus, you’ve got to let it run wild and hope it leaves quickly. Or do what I did in 2000 during my second trip to Morocco when I found at the top of another mountain in the Riff mountains, outside Marrakech, in the burial grounds of a saint. Then a voice clearly said: “Leave. Go back to your family”. I had still five days left in Marrakech but I turned around, re-booked my ticket and fled back home to my wife and children.

But this time, I fought the urge to flee and I went through the main Palace with my sickness and exited through the gardens, like everyone else (the hordes of tourists) but unlike anyone else, I was guided to get lost and somehow walk out of the main path and I found myself by the entrance. There were still two more palaces I could have visited, the one built by Charles the Fifth and another Moorish smaller palace. But I could not go on. I left. Grabbed a bus and escaped back to the Hostel.

Later I described what happened to a young woman from Brazilian I had met on the Bus to the Hostel. She had just returned from Morocco with her own existential tribulations and we found we had much in common. Born and raised in central Brazil she had entered the mystical universe of a subculture of wandering healers who mixed African and Catholic energies to heal and bless the communities around them. It was her thesis, just like mine had been on the Gnawa of Morocco, who mixed African and Islam in their healing rituals of possession. I found a good hear and I was able to understand what the hell had happened.

My first thought was that it was time to leave before I started to hate everyone around me. It happens. And that’s why I stay away from touristy monuments that attract armies of visitors, camera in one hand, audio tour in the other. Restless bodies taking more photographs than they’ll ever know what to do with, them. As I moved from one vast vaulted room to another adorned beyond comprehension to perfectly manicured inner patios and small intimate places I tried to imagine how the space had actually been used. But, there was no furniture, just emptiness, and the endless chatter of inane commentary. I couldn’t stand it. It’s not that I felt superior to them. No. It felt like… on second thought, it felt like none of us belonged there. These rooms had been built for Sultans, architects, alchemists, poets, musicians, mathematicians, esoteric scholars and calligraphers. At some point in time a very limited amount of people had been given the right to actually see what I was seeing today after paying my 12 Euros. That’s all. That’s the price I paid to see with my own eyes these wonders that had once been hidden from so many. I’m all for democracy. But that doesn’t me that everything and anything should be turned into a spectacle. I mean, what right do I have to enter this palace and occupy these once private spaces with my footsteps and my digital camera? I have none. I had no business being there and I’m sorry I went because for a few precious hours I was just another foot soldier in an invading army of marauding thieves taking what is not theirs. The imaginary space the Alhambra once occupied is rotting away. I hope something else even more beautiful comes out of it. And this time it better cost me some blood.

Morocco: "there are places that make your soul grow"

Malaga leaving

Traces of Morocco are everywhere... the city is splattered with high quality poster of exotic Morocco as a destination that will "enlarge your soul". A young twenty something rubs a lamp ad from it emerges a vision: A white couple by a small desert fire in the night is echanted by a blue turbanned storyteller. A trace within a trace, like a dry river bed awaitig the flood.

I´m going North now. To Granada in the footsteps of the conquering Berbers!

Malaga

On the plane met a young man from Canada who had just graduated from College and was invited to a conference in Malaga on helping young graduates fin work in the global market. He took a cab from Heathrow to Gatwick which cost him a taggering 120 pounds! No one told him there was a bus for 2o pounds. I wonder who is paying all that money for this kid to travel all the ay from Canada to Malaga to find out how to get a job. Global capitalism is getting stranger and stranger...

I did look for Picasso but only found a small beach side restaurant with old ladies eating shrimps and cackling about their last trip to the red light district in Amsterdam. It helps top know Spanih while pretending to be Canadian.

In Transit - leaving one skin behind

Keeping with the shedding of old skins, all my preconceived notions of how nasty Britt Border Agents can be evaporated after the Agent asked me if he had seen any of my films - I put down as my profession "filmmaker". I told him about Prisoner's in Time, a film I co-wrote with my father about a WWII POW from the death march in Kanchananburi who had been tortured and was possesed by the idea of fiding the translator whose he heard during the sessions - which included waterboarding! A Japanese (and American) favorite.

He said he had seen it!

And then we veered to a conversation on the power of morbid stories to capture our imagination. Brought by my mention of Shaheed and Suicide Bombers - a script the BBC commissioned a few years back. He mentioned one of his favorite TV series from long ago"Black Box" on the retrieval of Black boxes from plane crashes. Very appropriate I thought coming from an Airport Border Agent!

Unto Malaga!

My Grandfather dreams of Russia?

Into the Blue

Today, I start a journey conjured up ten years ago from a dream that took me deep into the waters of Mystical Islam.  And now, on St. John's Day, after going through a meat grinder, I'm prepared to leap over fire, into that dream once again. Every time a bit more awake. Shedding old skins, ready for a new sacrifice, ready to step into the Blue, the Blue of Moses the Traveller, the seeker of new lands, the seer of new forms, I'm well aware of the many traps along the way, this thirsty throat sure likes lemonade even though it knows water would be best. But the door opens and I must step through its threshold.