The hands that speak before the voice arrives.

In the photograph there is no smoke, no dramatic chiaroscuro, no hat hiding the face. Rafael Romero “El Gallina” stands before the microphone, in a light suit, with both hands open and raised to chest height — as if trying to hold in the air something only he can see. Mouth slightly open. Eyes half-closed. The voice about to emerge.

Paco Manzano shot at the Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid on April 1, 1987, during the Cumbre Flamenca — the festival that throughout the eighties gathered the most important figures of cante jondo in the capital. El Gallina was then over seventy and had spent decades as one of the most respected voices of Gypsy flamenco from Córdoba. He was not a name for the general public — he was a name that connoisseurs pronounced in a low voice, with reverence.

What Manzano captured in that image is the grammar of cante: a cantaor’s hands are not decoration. They are the instrument with which he measures time, summons the duende and tells the body what the voice has not yet said. In El Gallina, those open hands before the microphone are the prologue to everything that is about to happen.

This photograph hangs today on the walls of Cardamomo. If you are here it is because you saw it in the room. Now you know what happened that night.