Music: Little Silver Hands

In a whitewashed, thatch-roofed cabaret in St.-Maries-de-la-Mer, west of the French Riviera, the crowd sat in the smoky darkness one night last week as the guitarist strummed the gypsy rhythms that he had learned as a boy. The slight, intense performer did not like the feel of the crowd—”les marts,” he contemptuously called them, “the dead ones.” His playing was listless until midnight, when the dead ones left, and an enthusiastic group of flamenco appreciators—some gypsies among them—arrived from Aries. Then 29-year-old Ricard Baillardo (Manita de Plata, or Little Silver Hands to his admirers) came alive.

From the six strings of his guitar, he plucked the haunting, staccato music that only gypsies can make. “Se toca asi [That’s the way]!” cried someone. “Your hands are not of silver, but of gold.” He moved among the crowd, found a pretty French girl, and sang her a Spanish compliment: “You are beautiful. Your husband is a silly man unworthy of you, and we should meet tomorrow.” The girl smiled in mystification, and De Plata moved away. At last, before dawn, the concert ended. “I have rarely played so well,” said De Plata. “I have the guitar in my heart.”

“Christ Danced.” The current rage of the Riviera, Manita de Plata is one of a handful of guitarists in southern France who get out their instruments after the tourists leave and play the fiercely emotional music that they call their own. Anyone can finger the guitar, they believe, but only the true gypsy can play “flamenco”—a word that to Andalusians literally means “gypsy.”

A style that contains Byzantine, Arabic, Hebraic and Moorish influences, flamenco reaches so far back into the gypsy’s dim and restless history that no one can tell whence it came. Entirely improvised, its techniques have been handed down through countless generations by the Andalusian gypsies of southern Spain. The themes are basic as life: love, loneliness, birth, death. The music is so rhythmically complex that it is too sophisticated for all but the best of modern guitarists. The lyrics evoke the same ingenuous moods as the music: “I love you so much that I would like to carry you away hidden in my pocket like a morsel of bread.” “The day you were born the sun put on clean clothes, there was celebrating in Heaven, and even Jesus Christ danced.”

Playing for Himself. Born in a gypsy wagon near Sète, a seaport near Marseille, De Plata is of the best flamenco tradition. He is illiterate, cannot even read music. His father was a horse trader who taught his son the guitar and encouraged him (“Manita, you have remarkable hands”). For the next 20 years, roaming southern France in the caravan, De Plata stayed out of school to spend his time practicing and listening to other gypsy players.

In time he discovered that people would pay to hear him play. But money means little to him: “When I am playing well, nothing else counts. I am playing for myself.” He has never signed a recording contract, although a recording of his cabaret performances was illegally released in France, and Decca is attempting to release another De Plata disk over his lawyer’s protests. Like many of his fellow guitarists, he has a scorn for non-gypsy audiences, often deliberately insults them in his improvised lyrics. He has turned down an offer from a New York nightclub because he gets seasick on ships and fears planes. Recently he tore up a glowing letter from Admirer Jean Cocteau. “You don’t realize who Cocteau is,” said a reproving friend. Replied De Plata: “Does Cocteau know who Manita de Plata is?”