blogpost 59, 08-JUN 2025, Reijer Staats
To share is to heal
“Mate, I missed something,” a friend from Holland texts me after reading my latest blog post. “I think it’s the wine. This time I didn’t feel the romance, it read more like a postcard. But I still love you...” And suddenly, Jaap appears before my mind’s eye, a mentor from the past, with a short grey beard, his kind therapist´s eyes behind a pair of simple glasses looking at me. I hear his voice.
I’m telling a long, endless story while Jaap picks up an imaginary thread and slides it through an invisible needle. “What part of this is the common thread?”
When I started sharing my vulnerabilities beyond our private conversations and told Jaap enthusiastically about the reactions, he concluded: “And thát, Reijer, is what we call the universality of the problem: To share is to heal.”
Jaap’s one-liners… I could easily gather them into a small book of wisdom.
Martin, it´s Linda
On Monday evening we go for flamenco at Restaurante La Traviesa in Salobreña with our friends Jacqueline and Edwin – they also took the photos above. We imagined some kind of dinner show. Hadn’t been ourselves yet, though we always recommend it to our guests, who are always happy with it, no exceptions. The dancer is sweating, the red rose in her hair is about to fall out, and I feel like getting up to tuck it back in. But something about the way she looks holds me back. How beautiful to see this so close in such a small setting.
Sigh. If only we weren’t stuck behind this noisy French table in their sixties. They just keep on chatting. Every now and then, a sharp “Sssst” cuts through the restaurant.
We finish our main courses. The dancer takes a break. I turn my chair, lean in, and rejoin the conversation. There’s some mild irritation at our table too, especially about the dominant French woman at the corner of the table. Johan is clearly amused. He’s caught onto something and has a little idea running through his head. Smiling, he passes his phone around. On the screen: a TV character from the early 2000s. It’s Linda from Little Britain. “Well, now I really can’t look at that woman normally anymore!” he says with a grin.
And yes, there she is, sitting right next to us. Same outdated grey haircut: the corners of her mouth drop slightly as she talks showing her lower teeth. Her brown eyes are sharp and fixed. That constant scanning look, as if everything around her needs to be evaluated. A bit of a know-it-all. Just a bit too present, probably without even realising it.
During the segunda parte of the flamenco, Linda ends up front and centre in many of our photos. She spins dramatically towards the stage to clap enthusiastically, then swings back to her plate, where her mouth drops again immediately — she seemed kind, but is in fact not at all interested in the performance. She then puts her bottom teeth into her food and raises her index finger, moving it side to side almost nonstop, demanding the attention of the staff and her tablemates — of whom at least one, her husband?, is sure to be called Martin.
Sometimes life just feels like a sketch. Tonight with Linda in the center.
Duende
Wednesday evening, 21:00, Casa de la Cultura.
A second flamenco show in a short time with the same group.
Eloísa, the flamboyant former owner of our Casa Larimar, already introduced in the Spanish Chit Chat Fernando (only available in Dutch, sorry), talks about Pueblo Gitano (Gypsy people) and centuries of Spanish oppression.
The local flamenco school of Almuñécar appears in brightly coloured dresses and shows how, 700 years ago, gypsy footsteps first touched Spanish soil. A five-year-old dancer steals hearts right from the start, the school director shines in the lead role, and the heartfelt voice turns out to be that of a young muchacho sitting on a stool. In the background on stage, a few students move now and then. Clearly senior beginners from Northern Europe, somewhat stiff, always just a bit too slow and lacking the necessary flair. They keep drawing my attention and every now and then make me suppress a burst of laughter. And then, at the end of the show by the exit, a young dancer with Down syndrome spontaneously takes her moment with a solo and steals the show.
Ooohh. A small cry rises inside me, followed by the thought: there really aren’t many men. Maybe something for me? After all, I was still looking for a new hobby in Almuñécar.
Pueblo Gitano goes on about forced conversion to Catholicism, about oppression and persecution. During the Holocaust, many were deported to Auschwitz and only recently has Spain recognised Roma culture as one of the foundations of Spanish culture. Perhaps it is this history that makes the OLÉS from the audience feel like a shockwave through the theatre: duende, a power, a struggle, rising from within and from the soles of the feet upwards, just as poet Lorca so beautifully described.
This story is not just history, the story is current. I truly hope that people will start voting for tolerance again in future elections. Jaap´s "To share is to heal" remains relevant too. I received so many responses to my post about my mother. They soften again what had become hard. And all our Spanish worries over the past months, and there have been quite a few, have been reduced to mere sketches.
Hasta luego!
Johan & Reijer