| Excerpt from the Novel-in-Progress On the Southside of Seville Copyright 2007 by Susan Nadathur Chapter 1 When Diego Antonio Vargas first arrived in the Spanish Gypsy ghetto on the Southside of Seville, he was nine years old, thrilled to be sitting with his suitcase in the front seat of a drug lords car, and fascinated by the donkey that brayed from an open window on the ninth floor of his new home. The government had rules about animals in public housing, but no interest in sending the police to enforce them. Their job was the relocation of the Gypsy community from their homes in Triana to the housing project called Tres Mil Viviendas, and thats exactly waht the Spanish government did in the year 1967, its job. Ten years later, the donkey was still there. Diego leaned back against the outside wall of his apartment building, reached into his shirt pocket, and withdrew a cigarette. He lit the tip, took a drag, and watched young Chucho Sanchez offer a handful of grass to El Bobo, the donkey. Ten years ago, it was Chuchos father who fed the ass. Diego flicked burnt ash onto the cracked sidewalk, wondering how he could have once thought that keeping a donkey as a pet was a cool thing, or that there was any reason to be impessed with drug dealers who helped the community while securing their loyalty with threats of intimidation. At the age of nineteen, he saw life differently. Recently married, he was madly in love, soon to be a father, and desperate to get out of the ghetto where he had been forced to live with his people as an unwelcome resident of his own country. Life went on in Tres Mil Viviendas, but little changed. The barriada was still a notoriously undesirable place where taxi driers and humanitarian aid workers refused to go, where the streets stank of garbage and the couryards of urine. The stairwells reeked of beer, the apartments of garlic. And in this sordid, stinking ghetto were few Spaniards ever went, drugs were easier to find than jobs, and criminals were often highly skilled flamenco guitarists. |