In Transylvania, there are said to be only a few thousand of them still travelling with their horses and their wagons. They are Roma, the last nomads of Europe: gastrareas, horse traders, Gabors who go from village to village selling gutters, musicians brought in for weddings. Their people are said to have left India several centuries ago, without ever finding a land on which to settle for good. The road is still there, and it remains their only promise; but every field belongs to someone, and the gendarmes are never far away.
Among the gastrareas, “you don’t poach, you fish or you hunt”, “you don’t steal cherries, you pick them”, and “you don’t squat, you settle for the night”.Dumbraveni, a small town of 12,000 inhabitants in the heart of Transylvania, on the Great Tarnava. Once every three months, a horse market is held there by the roadside: Christophe hopes to find the trail of the gastrareas, a caste of Roma who live from horse trading, and who are nomads. Barely through the gate, he is sent packing in under two seconds. Yet there he met Super, a young gastrarea, who gets into his old Dacia and takes him to his family. Super has eighteen brothers and sisters. The camp has been set up out of sight, below a meadow: a few wagons, the smell of horses and burnt plastic, wary or welcoming looks. A prayer is said for the sheep before it is slaughtered, skinned and cut up. It will have to wait to be eaten: a kid has spotted a gendarmes’ car on the prowl. “The Padre” decides to keep Christophe, and to break camp. Since nothing is ever really unpacked, everything stays in the wagon, and in two seconds the horses are harnessed. Here, more than the horses, it is flight that keeps them moving.
Green countryside, a few plots of land where communities of Hungarians “were settled there by history”, and the wagons of the gastrareas passing by.The caravan stops by a river for some fishing by hand: the idea is to feel with your fingertips for fish that never come. Christophe feels only the mud under his feet, and what comes up is a Dacia headlight. Then the road returns. The land always belongs to someone, so they arrive at night, so as not to be spotted. In the chosen field, there is already the cowherd and his animals: the negotiation is tough between him, the owner and one of the travellers. A little plum brandy, sometimes a few banknotes, and the cowherds turn a blind eye. They push in behind the thickets, unharness, the men see to the horses, the women to the sheep. Christophe looks for his place: a gadjo, a non-Romani, and even a “gadjo dilo”, as they say, a crazy stranger. Around the fire, he asks why one keeps one’s hat on once the sun has set, how long people have been married, who decides in the camp. The plum brandy flows all night. At dawn, in less than two minutes, everything turns sour, without his quite knowing why; he leaves without having had time to say goodbye.
For the length of the stop, they unharness behind the thickets, hoping “that the gendarmes go to bed sooner than the sun”.
Around the fire, the plum brandy will flow all night, “mingling dreams and nightmares, legends and realities”.
Despite the evening by the fire, there is nothing for it: the stranger remains “a gadjo like any other”.The Gabors, for their part, are traders: some deal in bricks, others in gutters. Pista makes and sells gutters, and his reputation runs throughout the region. In the yard, beneath wide-brimmed black hats, the men cut, bend and fit the zinc sheets; Christophe asks whether, in Ceaușescu’s time, one could work like this: it was not free as it is today, you had to watch out for the police and the fines. Then the team takes to the road, to the rhythm of slamming doors, crumpling sheet metal and potholes: 120 kilometres in the morning, nearly 50,000 a year, watching at every bend for a roof without a gutter, a little rain in the sky. In front of a house, one of the Gabors calls Christophe over: the owner is “a good friend, we’ve known each other a long time”. They praise the metal, “quality!”, and invite him to touch it. Christophe lends a hand with the sheets, they measure, they add up: five metres, eighteen at the back, twenty-three in all. They tease him about his moustache, and the day ends over a little sweet cooked wine.
After the flight from the camp, Christophe sets off for Pista’s “in the hope of discovering another facet of the Romani world”.
The “gutter gang” shapes the metal on site, at the customer’s house, metre after metre.
The trade is passed on to anyone who wants to learn it: in one session, you shape “10 or 15 metres of guttering”.The Gabors told him about a Romani musician known to everyone around here. Under a wooden awning, Christophe sits down at the table with the band: saxophone, accordion, violin, clarinet. He asks where they learned to play, whether one is a musician from father to son as one is a gastrarea, whether the women follow the tours. Their own road crosses borders, with a concert abroad roughly once a month; the furthest was Holland. The saxophonist answers in Romanian: “I really like travelling, looking at the world, seeing beautiful things, playing in different countries, in different places, with different musicians.” They play Romani music, but also Romanian, Hungarian, Russian: anyone who plays by ear gets by anywhere. Then comes the wedding. They set off for the groom’s house, and as they go they invite the villagers to join the procession. The celebration lasts about six hours. Christophe senses that his journey ends here, he cannot go much further; on the tarmac, a young man is still dancing.
One is a musician from generation to generation, through parents and grandparents; the wife of one of them sings solo with him and his father.
These musicians play all the time, they say, at weddings, in restaurants, just about everywhere.
Horse traders, merchants or itinerant musicians, “in every case, the road runs in their veins”.
Long, pleated and brightly coloured, the women’s skirt is among the marks of the tradition of the Gabors of Transylvania.“Stones are part of the path!”Romanian proverb