Although I live in a town where there are a lot them, I seldom go to weddings. This is not only because, in my experience, bodas are boring, but because I am rarely if ever invited, in spite of the fact that I am very well known (being Montefrio's only extranjero) and quite well liked.

The reason - like most other reasons for things - is an economic one: attendance at a wedding, in an Andalucian village, is seen not as an occasion to make merry, but a solemn and sometimes even irksome duty. This is because, in a veiled sort of way, an invitation to a wedding is an invitation to pay. Therefore it cannot be decently imposed on just anyone, for the nominal monetary gift expected of each guest considerably exceeds the cost of the food and drink which he is likely to consume - and once you've been invited, you have to go. That is why people privately dread being invited to weddings - indeed, being summoned to a spate of bodas in a given season is seen by many as a minor financial disaster. It often happens that I suggest to some friend of mine that we get together on a Saturday afternoon and hear, in reply, the gloomy and untranslatable rejoiner "Estoy de boda". Funerals may be sadder, but they're cheaper.

Amazingly - to my Anglo-Saxon way of thinking - current-day Spanish weddings are highly profitable undertakings which can result, for the spouses, in net earnings of millions of pesetas. This is why, over recent years and with all the new money about, the sala de boda or reception hall racket has become the leading service industry of many an Andalucian backwater, such as my town, Montefrio (population 5,000). Since the guests are always people whose families have had weddings in the past or are likely to have them in the future, the idea is that their disbursement should be seen not as a total write-off but, rather, an investment in what might be called a "wedding insurance" policy - I pay for your daughter's now, you pay for my son's later. But as the only resident foreigner and with a murky marital status to boot, I stand well outside this closed circuit of calculated reciprocity and, mercifully, am not considered "invitable".

The exception comes when one of my gypsy friends marry. Here I simply invite myself, since I love the singing and dancing - the floor show alone being well worth the minimum amount which one has to cough up. And when my gypsy friend Franci got married in Mallorca recently, I went so far as to have my 84-year old father come from Canada in the company of his wife, and to ask my 8-year old daughter's teacher for a leave of absence from school in Granada, so that we could all be there for the party. The flamenco dancing at a boda gitana far surpasses, in sheer gutsy excitement, anything one sees on stage, which is why I do my best to never miss one of them.

But there was a strong personal element too. Franci (short for Francisco) is very special for both me and my father. 12 years ago I spotted him strumming a broken guitar in a street of El Coro, our barrio gitano, with a dreamy look in his eyes which impressed me as being that of a born musician. Shortly afterwards I noticed him again, at our flamenco club where a professional guitarist was giving a free course for half a dozen local boys. Franci was obviously dead serious about the matter, but the teacher had a disagreement with the club about the terms of payment and the course had to be called off, thus terminating Franci's musical education before it had really begun.

At that point, being rather well off at the time, I decided to offer him a year of lessons in Granada, at the home of the same teacher. The members of the flamenco club, greatly impressed by the gesture, matched it by buying him a new guitar and putting up the money for the bus fares. Franci's golden opportunity had come, and he made the most of it: since then, he has become a professional cabaret entertainer - not in nearby Granada, but on the island of Mallorca. That is where most of his clan spend the warm half of the year, cleaning hotel rooms and selling beer on the beach. There's no work in Montefrio after the olive harvest is over in February, so they go where the tourists are.

This is why, over recent years, I have seen much more of his mother, Custodia, than Franci himself - which is more than enough for me, since I am always welcomed in her home here in the village like a member of the family. In fact I have come to feel more her friend than his, since the stubby little woman's conversation is far more entertaining and, let us say, ethnically enriching than Franci's, who is very much the "man of few words" who only expresses his feelings when he is hunched over his instrument. I will never forget Custodia's reaction when I brought Nina from Brazil: she gazed down on my brown baby and cried, "¡Está hecha del mismo barro que nosotros! - She's made of the same clay as we gypsies!". Several years later, when Nina's mother and I discovered, without excessive bitterness, that (as Casilda succinctly put it) we lived in different worlds, Custodia expressed her disbelief that a man and woman who had parted ways could fail to hate one another's guts by saying, "¡Cucha! Tu santo ha estado en su iglesia, y sois amigos", which literally translates as "Listen to that! Your saint has been in her church, and yet, now you can be friends". Without missing a beat, I assured her that my santo had been paraded back and forth to many iglesias before docking at Casilda's, sending her and the other crones huddled around the mesa de camilla into gales of laughter. In conversation with the andaluces, you have to be quick on the draw, and especially if they're gypsies.

Last year Franci shocked the locals by appearing with his novia, a vivacious, fashionable and lissomely lovely young woman (standing half a head above him) who is a native of Mallorca, and not a gypsy. Her father owns a restaurant there in which Franci had given a show, and young Juana's passion for the music at once blossomed into a passion for the musician with the smouldering black eyes... Not least horrified of all was his mother, Custodia, who first refused to let them stay in her house. They were already living together on the island and she clung to the dream that her son would one day have a gypsy bride whose virginity - or honra - could be ritually examined on the wedding night. But after a few nights of exile in the village pensión, she gave in and they were allowed to sleep together under her roof.

"What can I do", the physically tiny but somehow imposing creature (whose nickname is La Nana, or The Dwarf) cried, holding up her arms in resignation, when I asked her what she thought of all this, "if he prefers a whiter fanny?". There are, in fact, a number of mixed couples in Montefrio, but they all involve payos of very humble extraction for whom marriage to a gypsy does not represent a significant social demotion. Franci, however, had netted a well turned-out creature who, were she a Montefrieña, would have set her sights on an employee of the Ayuntamiento or the Caja de Ahorros, not a penniless, albeit cuddly, gitano. "What must her parents think of him?", the villagers asked me incredulously, and I coolly replied that in fact he helped out in their restaurant in his off-stage hours and was very well accepted by them, "because they're not racists like you are". (This was not as harsh as it sounds, because in Spain the word racista is often - too often - bandied about in a milder register than "racist" in English, more like our "prejudiced").

I had long been curious to see how my gypsy friends lived in Mallorca, so as soon as we had settled in at the rather grand hotel in Palma (complements of my generous Dad), we drove to the village where they had their lodgings, on the eastern shore of the island. Cala d'Or seemed like a typical Mediterranean beach resort with bright stores festooned with sun umbrellas and plastic floats, except that on the sidewalk where we pulled up stood a small group of Montefrio gitanos with their sideburns and jackets and little trilby hats, looking distinctly out of date. Franci appeared and awkwardly said that we should sit at the sidewalk café because his mother was coming "up" - from a narrow staircase which led down between two apartment blocks - to see us. "Coming up?", I said, guessing that Custodia felt that their basement quarters were not presentable enough for such distinguished visitors, "why come up? We're going down!"

With a shrug of the shoulders he led us down what resembled a staircase in a ship leading to the hold, at the bottom of which we saw, once our eyes had adjusted to the relative gloom, a long rectangular patio - in fact the bottom of a slot between two buildings - where a number of gypsy children (most of whom Nina immediately recognized as her friends from El Coro) were playing; the rectangular space was surrounded with square-shaped rooms crowded with sofa-beds and a kitchenette in the corner, in each of which one of my vecinas from Montefrio seemed to be busy working over a gas burner.

Custodia received us with her usual scabrous humour. "Look how we live here!", she squawked, pointing at the cots cramped against one another, one with two big heaps of freshly ironed laundry on it, "in that one sleeps mi Gonzalo (in other words, my son Gonzalo) with his wife, in that one mi Paco with his - and we're so close together that the poor things can't even echar un chispillo (literally, make a little spark); when they want to, they have to go off into the fields...".

We sat down among the stacks of laundry and drank the beer which Franci went up to the café to bring us, while Custodia dished out several brimming bowls of yellowish stew from the pot on the fire, which were carried off by a girl to one of the other cubicles - their extended family included almost all the gypsies in Montefrio, and most of them seemed to be here.

On the way out one of Custodia's daughters-in-law, recognizing me, leaned out of her bedroom-kitchen, like a particularly attractive mare looking out of a stable, and laughed, "You see Lorenzo, what a bad life we gypsies lead here in Mallorca!". I shot back, "Yes, but you are all together and love one another, and that's worth more than the biggest house in the world!". But she seemed to think that it would be good to have the togetherness and the big house as well...

The next afternoon we drove to the north of the island, the place of the bride's home and where the wedding was to be held, in the village of Artá. As soon as we reached the top of the cliff on which the church stands, I was struck by the resemblance to Montefrio, except that from our monumental church the view is of the olive groves rather than the Mediterranean. Also, our iglesia is only an empty shell, built in the 16th century and abandoned in the 18th, whereas the church of Artá is gaily stuccoed and painted in the baroque style, full of colour and warmth.

A singer had been brought all the way from Extremadura - a friend of the family, since Juana's mother is a native of that deeply traditional part of Spain - to sing the misa flamenca. He was an enormously fat, flamboyant gypsy with long black curls, sensuous lips and theatrical gestures, who delivered his chant with great emotion. Even the village priest, who had stood silently next to him at the altar during the whole masterfully controlled explosion, could not contain himself and cried out his thanks to the man for so enhancing the ceremony, because, as he put it in his ecumenical fashion, "el flamenco es vida". And so it is.

Custodia sat forlornly through the whole thing, all dressed in black, for her husband who died several years ago. "It's the last one who is leaving me", she sighed. But later on she cheered up a bit, in Aquacity...

Getting there, as they say, was half the fun. This aquatic amusement park cum banquet hall - which, we were told, belongs to a friend of the bride's father who gave him a special price for the occasion - is near Palma, at the other end of what is really a rather large island. We set out on the narrow speedway which bisects Mallorca from north to south, on the tail of another reception-bound car, packed with gypsies and blaring flamenco music, but soon lost sight of it in the neck-to-neck traffic.

The rest was an adventure in the darkness, following contradictory instructions back and forth along the east coast of the island; at one point I gave up, stopped the car at a round-about and angrily said that enough was enough, we were going back to the hotel. But at that very moment a confetti-covered car glided past trailing ribbons and I shouted "It's them!" and tore off in hot pursuit. But after another stretch in what seemed to be - and was - the wrong direction, I realized that Franci's was not the only wedding being celebrated in Mallorca that night, and pulled in to a luxury condo, where the receptionist sketched a detailed diagram which, finally, led us back on our tracks to Aquacity - where we realized that we had already driven past it several times without catching sight of the sign neatly tucked away between two hedges...

It was a great consolation to find, once we got there, that most of the others had got lost also - but they soon started trickling, and then flooding, in. Franci and Juana had invited 300 guests but, to their consternation, many, many more were turning up. It seemed that the word had got out in the gypsy circles that a gitano was marrying a wealthy paya and that all gypsies were automatically invited to eat and drink... at their expense.

The catering service staff had to bring out extra tables, put extra pork in the micro-wave, and generally double their efforts to handle the onslaught. When I lined up before the table of honour, where Franci and his bride sat in state, to make my contribution (the standard 5,000 pesetas per head) I noticed that many of the diners were not approaching the table at all, and that most of the not very numerous banknotes in the big box were only 2,000 peseta ones... As any experienced boda-goer could have told at a glance, the affair was a financial disaster, costing Juana's father almost half a million pesetas. Of course, as far as we were concerned it was wonderful, just like the bodas in Montefrio, with the gitanas, young and old, going into the lists one by one to make their rip-roaring performance. Dad filmed it all, and Nina did her rumbita as well.

The next evening, when we came back from sightseeing on the west shore of the island, we were having a sandwich in the hotel coffee shop when we suddenly saw Franci wandering past, still dressed in his wedding attire, but with the starched shirt rumpled and open at the neck and his long curly hair in disarray. We were all fairly astounded, since we had never told him where we were staying. When the wedding reception was over, it seemed, at about six in the morning, he took Juana to their new flat in Artá -only to find, upon reaching the door, that the key had been removed from his key chain by some of their friends, as a practical joke.

They decided to spend their wedding night in a hotel, and set off in their car to find one - and ended searching from one end of the island to the other. Mallorca in March is virtually empty but when the night receptionists of the hotels saw a gypsy come in at dawn asking for a room for himself and his bride out in the car, they must have imagined that they were going to celebrate some bloody defloration ritual, or worse, and told him that they were "completo". At last, they found one which would take them, and it just happened to be the Sol Jaime III.

They had spent the day sleeping and now wanted something to eat, but, he told us, the waiter had refused to make them sandwiches, because the kitchen was closed (it was about six). Dad immediately called the polite but rather haughty man over and begged him to do for Franci, who was a friend of ours, what he had not hesitated to do for us, and to put it all on our bill as well, and the sandwiches were made.

A little later that evening we went up to their room to deliver a pocket comb so that Juana could arrange her hair. She was sitting shyly on the bed wrapped up in a sheet, and the huge white wedding dress - which, she told us, had been imported from France at a cost of half a million pesetas - was lying on the floor between the bed and the wall. It seemed to fill up half of the room, like a great white swan.

The next evening, at the end of our day of sightseeing, we stopped to visit them at the restaurant in Artá. They were sitting rather glumly in front of the fire, worrying about all the money they would have to pay back to her father for his losses. "¡Ay, los gitanos!", Juana moaned. I laughed and said to my friend, "If you had married a gypsy girl they would never have done this to you", and he ruefully nodded his head in agreement. I couldn't help him teasing him, and added, "The trouble is, Franci, now, you are a payo".

The above texts were written by Lawrence Bohme, artist, author and conference interpreter, who lived in Montefrio and Granada. If you are interested in staying in one of his cottages in Montefrio then visit his website www.donlorenzo.com

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