"The Flamenco Academy"
Read "The Flamenco Academy" Online
Authors: Sarah Bird
Tags: #fiction, #coming of age, #womens fiction, #dance, #obsession, #jealousy, #literary fiction, #love triangle, #new mexico, #spain, #albuquerque, #flamenco, #granada, #obsessive love, #university of new mexico, #sevilla, #womens friendship, #mother issues, #erotic obsession, #father issues, #sarah bird, #young adult heroines, #friendship problems, #balloon festival
The Flamenco Academy
To Greg Case, editor of
The Journal of Flamenco
Artistry
, August 23, 1945—July 11, 1998.
And to all true
flamencos
, past and
present.
First published by Random House, 2006
Copyright © Sarah Bird, 2006
EBook published by Sarah Bird at Smashwords, 2012
Copyright © Sarah Bird, 2012
Cover design by Gabriel Bird-Jones
EBook design by
A Thirsty Mind
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be
reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic
or mechanical, without permission in writing from the author.
The Flamenco Academy
is a work of
fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products
of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any
resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead,
is entirely coincidental.
Table of Contents
In the green morning
I wanted to be a heart.
A heart.
And in the ripe evening
I wanted to be a nightingale.
A nightingale.
(Soul,
turn orange-colored.
Soul,
turn the color of love.)
In the vivid morning
I wanted to be myself.
A heart.
And at evening’s end
I wanted to be my voice.
A nightingale.
Soul,
turn orange-colored!
Soul,
turn the color of love!
—
Federico García Lorca
(1898-1936)
Flamenco has Ten Commandments. The first
one is:
Dame la verdad,
Give me the truth. The second is: Do
it
en compás,
in time. The third one is: Don’t tell
outsiders the rest of the commandments. I come here, to the edge of
the continent, to honor the first commandment, to give myself the
truth.
Waves, sparkling with phosphorescence in the
darkness, crash on the shore just beyond my safe square of blanket.
I cup my chilly hands around a mug of tea that smells of oranges
and clove and search for that first streak of salmon to crack the
far horizon. There might be one or two early risers, insomniacs,
troubled sleepers, who will see the light of a new day before me.
But not many. I am alone with my tea and my thoughts.
The waves roll in all the way from Asia
and slam against the shore. Their roar comforts me. It almost
drowns out the sound of heels, a dozen, two dozen, pounding on a
wooden floor, turning a dance studio into a factory manufacturing
rhythm. That is the ocean I hear. It is broadcast by the surge of
my own blood, pulsing
en compás,
in time, to a flamenco
beat. My heart beats and its coded rhythms force me to
remember.
Once upon a time, I stepped into a story
I thought was my own. It was not, though I became a character in it
and gave the story all the years it demanded from my life. The
story began long before I entered it, long before any of the living
and most of the dead entered it
.
I start on the night that I saw the greatest
flamenco dancer of all time perform. That night I had to decide
whose story my life would be about.
It was early summer in Albuquerque, when the
city rests between the sandblasting of spring winds and the
bludgeoning of serious summer heat to come. New foliage made a
green lace against the sky. The tallest trees were cottonwoods and
they spangled tender chartreuse hearts across the clouds. It was
the opening evening of the Flamenco Festival Internacional. A
documentary about Carmen Amaya, the greatest flamenco dancer ever,
dead now for forty years, was to be premiered at Rodey Theater on
the University of New Mexico campus.
I dawdled as I crossed the campus. The air
smelled like scorched newspaper. The worst forest fires in half a
century had been blazing out of control in the northern part of the
state. Four firefighters had already been killed and still the
fires moved south. That morning, the Archbishop of Santa Fe
announced that he would start saying a novena the next morning to
lead all the citizens of New Mexico in prayers for the rain needed
to save the state, to save our beloved
Tierra del
Encanto
.
I slowed my pace even more. I wanted to
reach the theater after the houselights were out so that I could
see as much of Carmen Amaya and as little of “the community” as
possible. I dreaded being plunged again into the hothouse world of
New Mexico’s flamenco scene. Tomorrow, when I started teaching, I
would have no choice. Tonight was optional and only the promise of
glimpsing the greatest flamenco dancer ever could have dragged me
out.
Although we, all us dancers, had studied
every detail of Carmen’s mythic life, although we had pored over
still photos and read descriptions of her technique, none of us had
ever seen her dance. Film footage of her dancing was so rare and so
expensive that we’d had to content ourselves with listening to the
legendary recordings she made with Sabicas. We memorized the
sublime hammer of her footwork, but hearing was a poor substitute
for seeing.
Only the news that the documentary contained
footage of Carmen Amaya performing could have gotten me out of my
bed and into the shower. The shower had removed the musty odor of
rumpled sheets and unwashed hair I’d wrapped myself in for the past
several weeks since I’d taken to wearing my own stink as
protection, as a way to mark the only territory I had left: myself.
I wouldn’t have been able to face the humiliation of seeing “the
community” at all if I hadn’t had my newly acquired secret to lean
on.
When I was certain that Rodey Theater would
be dark, I slipped in the back and grabbed the first empty seat.
Only there, alone and unseen, was it safe to take the secret out
and examine it. It strengthened me enough that I corrected my
slumped posture. I’d leaned on my new knowledge to get this far;
tomorrow, somehow, some way, the secret would guide me to what I
needed, what I had to have. Of course, tonight it changed nothing.
To everyone in the theater, which was every flamenco dancer,
singer, and guitarist in New Mexico, I was still the most pathetic
creature imaginable: the third leg of a love triangle.
The credits flickered; then Carmen Amaya’s
tough Gypsy face filled the screen, momentarily obliterating all
thoughts. It was brutal, devouring, the face of a little bull on a
compact body that never grew any larger or curvier than a young
boy’s. As taut with muscle as a python’s, that body had made Carmen
Amaya the dancer she was. A title beneath her face noted that the
year was 1935. She was only twenty-two, but had been dancing for
two decades.
She oscillated in luminous whites and inky
blacks, gathering herself in a moment of stillness, a jaguar
coiling into itself before exploding. A few chords from an unseen
guitarist announced an
alegrías
, Carmen’s famous
alegrías
. The audience, mostly dancers as avid as I, leaned
forward in their seats. Hiding from random gazes, I burrowed more
deeply into my chair, considered sneaking out. Even armed with my
secret, I wasn’t strong enough yet for this. There would be
questions, condolences, sympathy moistened with a toxic soup of
schadenfreude. I wasn’t ready to be a cautionary tale, the
ultra-pale Anglo girl who’d dared to fly too close to the flamenco
sun.
I was pushing out of my seat, about to
leave; then Carmen moved.
A clip from one of her early Spanish movies
played. The camera crouched low. Her full skirt whirled into
roller-coaster arcs that rose and plunged as those bewitched feet
hammered more rhythm into the world than any pair of feet before or
since. I dropped back into my seat, poleaxed by beauty as Carmen
told her people’s hard history in the sinuous twine of her hands,
the perfectly calibrated arch of her back, the effortless
syncopation of her feet.
I tore my eyes from the screen long enough
to pick out the profiles of other dancers, girls I’d studied with
for years, women who’d instructed us. They were rapt, mesmerized by
the jubilant recognition that Carmen Amaya was as good as her
legend. No, better. That not only was she the best back then, but
if she were dancing today none of us, forty years after her death,
could have touched her. I wished then that I were sitting with
those other pilgrims who’d made flamenco’s long journey, who
understood as I did just how good Carmen was.
I joined in the muttered benediction of
óles
, accent as always on the first syllable, that whispered
through the theater; then I surrendered and let Carmen Amaya’s
heels tap flamenco’s intricate Morse code into my brain. Though I
had willed it to never do so again, my heart fell back into
flamenco time and beat out the pulses with her. Flamenco flowed
through my veins once more. From the first, flamenco had been a
drug for me, an escape from who I was, as total as any narcotic,
and Carmen Amaya hit that vein immediately, obliterating despair,
rage, all emotion other than ecstasy at the perfection of her
dancing.
The brief clip ended. We all exhaled the
held breath and sagged back into our seats. An old-timer, white
shirt buttoned up to the top and hanging loosely about a corded
neck, no tie, battered, black suit jacket, appeared onscreen. A
subtitle informed us that he had once played guitar in Carmen’s
troupe.
“Tell us about Carmen’s family,” an
offscreen interviewer asked.
“
Gitana por cuatro costaos
,” the
guitarist answered. “Gypsy on four sides.” The translation of this,
the ultimate flamenco encomium, made my secret come alive and beat
within me. Blood, it was all about blood in flamenco.
The withered guitarist went on. “Carmen
Amaya was Gypsy on all four sides. We used to say that she had the
blood of the pharaohs in her veins back in the days when we still
believed that we Gypsies came from Egypt. We don’t believe that
anymore, but I still say it. Carmen Amaya had the blood of the
pharaohs in her veins. That blood gave her her life, but it also
killed her.”
“What do you mean?”
“Her kidneys. The doctor called it infantile
kidneys. They never grew any bigger than a little baby’s. La
Capitana only lived as long as she did because she sweated so much
when she danced. That was how her body cleansed itself. Otherwise,
she would have died when she was a child. Her costumes at the end
of a performance? Drenched. You could pour sweat out of her shoes.
She had to dance or die.”