Carmen Amaya speaks:

I went everywhere with my father. When the police weren't around and there were no night rounds [by serenos], they let me dance in the Villa Rosa. Imagine that, at only five or six years old! Everyone gave me lots of money. There came a time when Miguel Borrull and Julia Borrull, the owners of the cafe, saw that I was getting all the money in the juergas, and when they saw us coming they would yell, "Get out of here! Get out of here Chino—that's what they called my father—the police are here!" Of course it was a lie, but we had to go, even though we had waited around for many hours—many nights in the winter cold.

I also worked in El Manquet, on Santa Madrona, and in the bar of Juanito el Dorado. In El Manquet there was a large cuadro de baile: Micaela, El Gato, El Farruquero, Tobalo, Lolilla la Cabezona, my aunt, La Faraona, El Bulerías, and my father. El Gato had an extraordinary physique: no woman had a waist like his. There has never been another like him. And El Farruquero... El Farruquero was the best of all times; when he died, twenty million could come along and none will dance like he did.

Other nights I danced in the Cádiz, a bar owned by Juanito el Apañao, of the Bienvenido family. And also in the small towns, in Tarrasa or Sabadell. I danced on tabletops. And when I came down from dancing, I sold lottery tickets. And by age seven I had gone to Paris in the company of Raquel Meller.

There were times when they shaved my head clean and put petroleum jelly on it to kill the lice. Imagine how it was, dancing with my head shaved and my eyes, full of mucous and half-closed like a donkey's, unable to open because of the tobacco smoke! I began to dance at four years of age. But that wasn't what I liked to do the most. I liked to get a piece of cardboard, climb up the mountains of coal waste near the beach, and hurl myself down.

I was never beaten in my house. My father used to say, "On top of dancing her heart out on Saturdays and Sundays, are we going to hit her? Let her run around like a young deer and do whatever she wants!"

In one of the cafes, the one belonging to Joaquín Escaño, I had a particularly happy night. When I arrived I saw a doll that I had been admiring in a store window. "It's for you," they told me. Later, they wanted me to dance but I didn't want to put down my doll. "We'll put it here in front," they said, and they seated the doll in front, in the audience. All night long I danced for my doll.

Whenever papa and I arrived home the family was waiting anxiously for us, no matter what the hour. We would bring large loaves of fresh bread and right then and there fry it with tomatoes, and put in ham. That day that I came home with the doll I said to my sisters, "This is for the three of us, but we are going to put it here so that we don't break it."

My sister Antonia said, "Like that, so that I can't have it?"

"Yes, I will let you have it, but we'll put it here so that we all can enjoy it."

The next day, she had torn off the hair and the dress. The dress fit Antonia well, because the doll was very big and she was very small.

My dresses? There is one in Montevideo, in the museum, that was sewed by my mother. Let me tell you: In our shack, our hut in the Somorrostro, among the rocks, I had made a hole in the wall to hide my dance shoes and stockings. Because there on the beach I always went barefoot, running here and there like a deer. That is why my feet are so wide, along with dancing, and that is why I have the strength I have in my legs. All from the sand.

I have never told any of this to anyone. But it doesn't matter to me now because I am very proud of all of these things. During the week, my father sold clothes in order to put food on the table, and my mother went to the market with her cart of baby squid, also to sell. I was about seven or eight, the oldest of the sisters. It made me sad to see her return home and there would be no coal or firewood in our shack. Remember those big gas tanks in Somorrostro? Well, trucks used to go there to dump all the coal waste. I had the nerve to join in the hundred people there. Here came the truck, and here was the cut in the mountain where water ran. There would be at least a hundred people. It didn't matter to them that the truck might fall on them, or that the water was flowing down the ravine. Just to gather the coal before it fell down to the tanks. I had to go in between the feet to pick up a little piece of coal. And with all that, with them killing me, I gathered the coal and filled my sack and dragged it from the gas tanks to the Somorrostro—with all that weight of wet coal. The men had little wagons, but I had only my sack, dragging it through the sand. Even if it took me twenty-four hours I would get that sack to my house. Once I arrived home, I searched for firewood on the sand, and before my mother arrived I had her little fire lit. She always brought some little tidbit for me, a banana or some broken cookies.

One day I saw some gypsies loaded down with chickens. "Uy! Where did you get that?"

"Uy! Mira, from the station. There is a man bringing cages full of chickens, and they are so tightly packed that some of them are suffocating, and he gives us the suffocated ones."

"Ah! Well I'm going, too!"

I had no more than passed the barrier at the train station, which was in place, when a guard saw me and said, "You were going to steal, weren't you?"

I say, "Me, señor? Steal? Not me señor, I wasn't going to steal. I came here because my friends told me that they were giving away chickens here. But I wasn't going to steal."

      "Come with me to the police station!"

What I feared at that moment was that I would be seen by a policeman who was a very good friend of mine, who on some nights, after I finished dancing, let me sleep in a bed with his daughter so that I wouldn't have to return to Somorrostro at dawn. I didn't want him to see me in that way, with all the filth that covered me, because I had just come from collecting coal. I cried and yelled, but the guard wouldn't let go of my hand. Until finally, when we reached the bullring, the old bullring in Barcelona, you could see that the man, seeing my tear-filled face, began to feel some compassion and let go of my hand. The instant he let go of my hand I was off and running. Imagine! It is just that here in Spain, unfortunately, gypsies get no consideration from the police. They are treated like dogs!

There is an alley that can be used to enter the Somorrostro, next to the tuberculosis hospital. It is used to avoid going all the way around by the beach or by the gas tanks. One time it seemed strange to see that water had reached that far. It was about two thirty in the morning. My father was dying of worry. "What is going on at our shack, with your mother and sisters?"

But the water had miraculously passed by our hut, without getting inside. Since we were used to those things, we went to bed. Until, after a while, ay, madre mía, a wave surged inside; the beds, clothing, everything was floating. We gathered up the little ones the best we could and ran out into the alley, where there were hundreds of people. At nine or ten in the morning we returned to the shacks. There wasn't one left, all of them buried in sand. You could see where your shack had been by some pieces sticking up.

Papá began to realize my ability when I was five years old. He took up his guitar and started me dancing. He would say to me, "No, not that way. Do it again! That's it!" Or "That's good," or "That's bad," or "That's not in compás." Everything came from me. Without teaching me a single step of dance, he was the one who taught me. My knowing how to dance is entirely due to my father. Once I went to a dance school, but I can't repeat what the teacher said to me. My father wanted me to dance to orchestra. Dancing to orchestra was the most difficult thing in the world for me. Those were the most bitter days of my life, filled with the biggest tantrums. Finally I went to an academy, on Calle Nueva. The teacher was named Vicente Reyes. I was in love with a piece by Maestro Serrano, entitled "Los claveles."  The man choreographed it for me and began to teach me the steps. Within five minutes I was desperate. Of course, I was a beginner. So I said to him, "Look here, maestrito, would it matter to you if, instead of doing it that way, I did it this way?"

He kicked me out. That was the only experience I had with a dance teacher. God save me—that's not for me!

The first thing I learned was la zambra. I sang it and danced it. The first zambra that I danced was this one:

En un campo de moras

bajó el sultán un día

por ver si alguna mora

a él gracia le hacía.

De una mora cautiva

el sultán enamoró,

y la tiene prisionera

para gozar de su amor.

Le dice a sus padres,

que sufren y lloren,

que no pasen pena

por su linda mora.

Alá, alá, date prisa, mora,

que viene el sultán.

 

Later, I began to dance por soleares, la farruca. And, finally, my father made me put on pants and dance dressed as a man, por alegrías. Pants are unforgiving; you show all the defects in the world and you have nothing to hold onto.

My father, who sang very well, liked my singing better than my dancing. "I want you to sing, not dance!" my father used to say to me in fiestas. And I would always have a tantrum, because I have never liked to sing. I love to listen to singing, but not for them to make me sing. And with my father it was always, "Sing, sing!" And he wouldn't leave me alone until I sounded like a hoarse chicken. And one thing about my father: I have always wished that my father would have said to me, "How well you have danced tonight!" I still have that wish.

My real success began when I arrived in Madrid. In the Palacio de la Música. Yes, yes, I had danced for the king, in the World Fair [1929], in El Farolillo, when I said to him, "This is for you Señor King!" In Madrid, Don Diego, from the mines of León, used to take me to fiestas, to the Villa Rosa there, and he paid me stupendously. In 1934, I believe it was, there was an homage for Custodia Romero and Luisa Esteso. And they told Custodia, "I have brought a little gypsy girl to dance."

She replied, "Fine, put her wherever you want in the show, it doesn't matter to me."

I was ten years old. Imagine! I come out dancing a fandanguillo that I had learned in Santander and had performed on a tour of Andalucía with Manuel Vallejo. Bueno, I come out with my fandanguillo and everybody rises to their feet. They make me do an encore, por soleá, por alegrías. What an uproar! This woman was in her dressing room, and on hearing the scandal came out to see what was going on. When La Romero saw that I was still dancing, because there was such a furor and public outcry, she became very upset and asked for musicians to be brought so that she wouldn't have to dance to guitar, after what I had stirred up. She would have to dance after me and, as you can imagine, she chewed out the organizers: "You could have told me that this girl danced like that. I would have put her at the end!"

After that they contracted me for the Coliseum in Madrid, and that is where Luisa Esteso, who was at the height of her fame, gave me her blessing; she was the one who gave me the alternativa [in bullfighting, when an veteran bullfighter ordains a novice into the rank of full matador]. When I came out on stage, she hugged me and gave me her castanets, and I gave her mine, and said to me, "There you are!" I stayed for six months in the Coliseum. Then I was in El Lido, El Estambul, all of them."

The Civil War caught me on tour, in Valladolid. I was there for twenty days before I could leave for Lisbon. Then, from Lisbon to Buenos Aires. In Buenos Aires we spent a year playing to a packed theater, the Maravillas. Then Chile, Peru, Havana, Mexico, and the United States, where I stayed for five years and was worshipped. Those were the years when I bought the tower [her home] in Hollywood—it was divine! My father died while I was dancing in Uruguay. I returned to Spain when I was advised of the seriousness of his condition, and not even cannons could have kept me from his side.

On Her Marriage:

Juan Antonio, "the misunderstood," got frightfully drunk one night in Lyon. He used to sleep in a room upstairs from where we were. One night I heard a big noise, so I put on my nightdress and robe and went upstairs. When I entered the room I saw the guitar smashed to pieces on the floor. I stood there looking at it, while he was saying, "I'm going, I'm getting out of here!"

Nobody in the company had their passports, because the police had taken them for some purpose. And how could I leave that young man, without papers or anything? Even though we were not very close yet and we still used "usted" in speaking to each other, how could I leave that young man so that—I was thinking—the police could give him a beating and kill me? So there you have me, in my robe, saying, "Wait, wait until tomorrow to get the train!"