Little Money Street In Search of Gypsies and Thier Music in the South of France

Diane isn't much of a cook. She lives off Marlboros, reheated black coffee, and morphine, and I have never in all these years seen Diane offer food to her husband or children. Every time I visit, she greets me with the ritual inducements to eat, drink (that is, have a cigarette, a glass of Coke, some Cheez Doodles). But only once have I eaten a meal at Diane's house. Diane, I think, was feeling a little guilty about the Yuri Buenaventura concert. Yuri Buenaventura is a Latin American salsa star who has a passionate following in southern France, where we live. This spring, his European tour included a gig at Perpignan's Mediator. "I'm gonna die if I don't hear Yuri live," Diane had been saying for months. If you spend much time with Diane, it's hard to resist wanting to be her fairy godmother. Six weeks in advance, I bought four tickets to Yuri Buenaventura's concert, thinking, Alastair and I, Diane and her husband, Moise, could all go. "Moise" is pronounced "Mo-EEZ." But Diane and Moise are Gypsies, and married couples' double-dating is not Gypsies' idea of fun. Diane asks Moise if he'd like to come along to the concert. Moise, at twenty-eight, is one of the greatest Gypsy singers in France. But Moise has a complicated attitude toward music, as if his own gift lies in a state of untaught purity that might be defiled either by too much use or by exposure to other people's music. Moise scowls. "No way, woman. It'll be full of Gypsies." "No, it won't." "Sure it will: Gypsies love salsa. Every lousy little Gypsy in Perpignan will be stuffed tight in that place, you know it." If Moise doesn't want to go hear Yuri, does that mean he'll stay home with the children? This is when a familiar game begins, the funny-sad cat-and-mouse routine of a couple who have been married since they were seventeen, and know in their sleep how to drive each other mad. "When's the concert?" Moise asks. Thursday. "Thursday, Thursday, Thursday." Moise furrows his brow, as if "Thursday" were a friend of Diane's whose face he can't quite place. Finally, he relents. "FineI'll stay home, rent a video for the kids." At the good news, Diane explodes into a shimmering volcano of joy. She jumps to her feet, shoves her favorite Yuri tape into the player and rolls the volume to the max, grabs me by the hands, and salsas around the apartment, a gap-toothed grin on her face. She picks up her cell phone, presses autodial to call her sister, her nieces, and her cousins to gloat, for the Yuri concert is famously sold out. "Christine? You'll never guess where me and Fernande are going Thursday night. . . ." A dozen times already I've made such plans with Diane, who is permanently crazy-itching-mad to burst out of the house, to flee the confines of being a stay-at-home mother in a culture that places pathological restrictions on women. Diane's ambitions are not really so extreme. She wants to go for a drink at Boca Boca, a chic Cuban-style bar with me and two "French" (i.e., non-Gypsy) friends. Diane needs this phalanx of palefaces: when she tries going to Boca Boca with her niece Tanya and an Arab schoolfriend of Tanya's, they are turned away at the door. She wants to go out for her birthday to a seaside disco with me and a bunch of girlfriends. Not so much to ask. Just a girls&Eberstadt, Fernanda is the author of 'Little Money Street In Search of Gypsies and Thier Music in the South of France', published 2007 under ISBN 9780307279422 and ISBN 0307279421.