"The Flamenco Academy" (20 page)

From somewhere outside the bunker, the sound
of a guitar being played echoed in. As she turned to leave, I
grabbed her arm. “Listen.” Didi paused as the music wafted into the
tunnel. “What if that’s him?”

The playing was rough and amateurish. “Rae,
if that’s him, I’d say he’s a pretty shitty guitarist. Don’t worry,
he’s not here. That’s some student practicing. Okay?”

I nodded.

“Rae-rae, you’re not breathing.”

“Deeds, I can’t do it. I can’t go out
there.”

“Then you’ll never get him.”

“Then I’ll never get him.”

“You mean you’re not even going to try?”

“I can’t. I just can’t.”

“Even knowing that he’s not going to be in
that class.”

“It’s not a logic thing.”

“Whoa! Whoa! I’m the last person in the
world who is going to insist something has to be logical. Logical
shit is easy. It’s the illogical shit that controls our lives.”

“I can’t. I can’t do any of this. I’ll just
wait for you at Frontier.” I started to walk out the opposite
tunnel.

“Rae, come on. I’ll go with you.”

I stopped. I didn’t really want Didi to go
to the class with me, didn’t want to share it with her. But I would
never walk into the class by myself. “Just to walk in the
door?”

“Sure. Walking in the door is always the
hardest part. Then you’re on your own, though, okay? The big pink
bird thing is your perverted fantasy. I have enough of my own to
keep track of. Deal?”

“Deal.”

The Flamenco Academy was a recent addition
to the back of Carlisle Gym, a two-story Pueblo-style adobe
building painted a soft fawn. Didi pushed through the turquoise
blue front door and I followed. The old gym looked like opening
night of a Broadway musical. Dancers from tap, jazz, and African
classes crowded the main hallway, changing into practice skirts,
slugging down water, putting on makeup, and taping their gnarly,
wrecked feet. The place smelled of decades of girl sweat and hair
spray.

“Jazz hands! Jazz hands!” Didi whispered to
me, waggling her fingers beside her head in a cheesy dance move.
Although she was mocking the frenzy of activity, I could hear the
thrill she was hiding behind the fake cynicism. Didi grabbed my
course schedule out of my hand and read, “Studio 110. Instructor
Alma Hernandez-Luna. Let’s try that way.”

Black wrought iron curled out the words THE
DOÑA CARLOTA ANAYA FLAMENCO ACADEMY above a set of carved wooden
doors so new they still smelled of varnish. Didi shoved them open
and we found a larger-than-life-size oil portrait of a flamenco
dancer staring down imperiously at us. She looked like a
silent-movie star, a dark-eyed vamp from the twenties or thirties
wearing a flat-crowned black hat with a veil of pom-poms ringing
the crown, spit curl plastered to her cheek. I assumed this was the
legendary founder of UNM’s flamenco program, Doña Carlota. Even in
the two dimensions of a portrait, she seemed ready to explode into
motion. Back arched regally, her bosom heaved against the tight,
scarlet fabric of her dress. A ruffled train cascaded off the back
of the dress. The front of the dress was cut up high to reveal
strong, muscled legs. Her ferocious gaze challenged my right to be
there. I did not belong.

Dancers from the advanced classes, almost
all Latina, rushed past us. Slender inkbrush ripples in their long,
dark skirts, their long, dark hair; they belonged in a flamenco
academy. As their skirts brushed against the polished floor, they
strode forward with the single-minded devotion of novitiate nuns
hurrying to chapel. As with Didi, if you’d taken a picture of any
one of those girls, then looked at the negative of that photo, the
exact reverse of all things flamenco, you would have seen my broad,
pale Czech face, the evidence that, not terribly far back in my
genetic lineup, there were generations of dozy, strawberry blond
milkmaids, all pale as steam. I felt fraudulent. I was a support
person. What the hell was I doing here even considering taking a
dance class? I’d never taken a dance class in my life. All I wanted
at that moment was to leave. I imagined the safety of an accounting
class. Of being hidden in the last row, letting strings of numbers
soothe the jittery anxiety scraping every nerve in my body. I would
have left, but Didi was already heading down the long hall,
searching for the right number.

She pushed through the chaos and I followed
her to studio 110. “So, here you are.” When I didn’t move, Didi
shook her head like an exasperated yet amused mother. “Rae, you
have that scared-shitless look.” She grabbed my arm and dragged me
into the studio. “See? No Mystery Man.”

I glanced quickly around the studio, found
it completely populated by females, and started breathing again.
The studio smelled new, untouched. High windows flooded the big
room with morning sunlight that refracted off mirrors covering the
walls. Brand-new wooden floors gleamed like a lake of honey. It was
the most beautiful room I’d ever entered.

“Oh Jesus, look, ballet swans.” Didi pointed
a surreptitious finger at a clutch of girls in a far corner. Years
of ballet training were obvious in the way they stood with their
toes turned out like ducks. They had their hair skinned into ballet
buns at the back of heads that wobbled atop freakishly elongated
necks. The swans hooked pointed feet over the barre that ran the
length of the room and folded themselves into the sort of stretches
favored by Hindu yogis and serious dancers.

Didi nodded her chin toward another group of
obviously experienced students and did jazz hands to identify their
subtype. The jazz dancers performed scary head rolls, whipping
their skulls around on rubberized necks. It all looked
intimidatingly professional. I started to panic.

Didi shook her head. “I thought you said
this was a beginner’s class.”

“It’s supposed to be.” The incipient panic
broke into a full gallop and I started to turn. Didi grabbed
me.

“Where are you going?”

“I can’t stay.”

“The hell you can’t. No one runs my girl
off. Especially not a bunch of binge-purge princesses like this
pack here.” With that, Didi jerked me down onto the floor where the
good dancers were stretching. What they were really doing was
checking one another out, sizing up the competition with sidelong
glances, heads resting on kneecaps or upside down on the floor
between straight legs. Then they pushed their stretches even
further. Didi stressed every ligament in her body, attempting to
reach farther and lower than any of them.

I flopped down next to her.

“This is a certified freak show.” Didi’s
comment calmed me. It was like being back in the Mustang with her
while she categorized all the different varieties of Whore-nut at
Pueblo High School, putting each one in its place and all of them a
safe distance away from us.

The door flew open and all the girls backed
off the stretch competition as we waited for Alma Hernandez-Luna,
the local-girl-made-good and current director of the flamenco
program, to step through the door. Instead, an ancient birdlike
woman crept in. Her hair, dyed an inky black, was plucked back into
a tight braid at the top of her head that stretched her skin,
tugging her eyes up until they had an Asian cast.

“Instant face-lift,” Didi whispered to
me.

It was hard to tell exactly how old the
woman was from her face—over fifty, under a hundred—but her hands
gave her away. Age-spotted, they were as twisted as a miniature
bonsai tree.

“I didn’t know that the university was
hiring bag ladies?” I touched a finger to my lips to silence Didi.
She rolled her eyes.

The class buzzed with whispers that were all
versions of “Where is Alma?”

The old woman tottered to the front of the
class, squared her shoulders, and took several long moments to
gather herself. Bit by bit, as if she were sucking energy up
through the floor and out of the very air, the old lady stood up
straighter and taller, until she looked as rooted and strong as a
cottonwood down by the river.

“
Buenos días, señoritas.”
A trilling
Castilian majesty whipped through her words. When all we did was
look at one another, baffled, she repeated the greeting even more
imperiously.
“Buenos días, señoritas.”

Didi stared the woman right in the eye as
she led the response.
“Buenos días, señora.”

“
Bueno
. If you want to learn ballet,
you must speak French, no? Well, if you want to learn flamenco, you
must speak Spanish.” Actually, what she said was, “Buono effa jew
wan to lairn flah-MEN-ko! Jew mus espick espanish.”

Didi caught my gaze and rolled her eyes in
reaction to the comical accent and I whispered to her, “You can
leave.”

“Are you kidding? A world-class freak show
like this?”

A girl with the giraffe posture, bun at the
back of her neck, duck-toed turnout, and bulimia-gray teeth of the
Serious Dancer, subgroup Ballet Swan, asked testily, “I thought our
teacher was supposed to be Alma Hernandez-Luna?”

At the girl’s peevish tone, Didi, now highly
amused, leaned toward me. “Wow, who put a toe shoe up
her
ass?”

The old woman stood even taller as she
answered. “Señora Hernandez-Luna has much more important things to
do than teach you
burros
.”

The little ballerina’s face screwed itself
into furrows of further annoyance as the old lady trilled the
r
’s in
burros
until they rattled like machine-gun
fire.

“Yeah, but—”

“But how can I teach?” the old woman
snapped. “Is that what you want to know? How can I teach when I am
old? How do I dare show myself when I am not young and tender?
Because my face is wrinkled and I have here”—she held up an arm,
which was surprisingly well muscled, powerful in fact; I had a
second look at her legs and saw that the old woman had the calves
of a soccer forward—“spots. Because my body is old, how can I not
crawl into a corner and cut my wrists? Is that what you are
asking?”

“Uh, no. I was only—”

“You are only an American girl whose
mamá
neurotica
gave her her first tutu before she could walk. Who
has studied jazz and modern and tap and African dancing and then,
one day, she sees Joaquin Cortés with his shirt off and she thinks,
Oh, jes,
flamenco
. So she decides she will put on the red
dress and learn flamenco. Except that,
coño!
...”

Some of the Hispanic girls in the class
flinched at the curse.

“Here is this old lady and she is not part
of your flamenco fantasy. Well,
phhtt
on your fantasy.” The
old woman dismissed the little ballerina with a swirl of her
fingers in front of her face in a gesture that was European,
ancient. “How can such an old lady teach you?” She drew herself up,
dropped her shoulders until her chest seemed to broaden to twice
its size, and answered her own question. “Because I
am
flamenco.”

“She ‘jam’ flamenco?” Didi asked, mocking
the woman’s accent. “Who
is
this whack job?”

I was embarrassed that Didi was there to see
how ridiculous my flamenco fantasy really was. I knew her patience
was wearing out because she stepped away from me and moved to the
back of the class. I was certain that, any second, she’d wave
bye-bye over her shoulder to me and the entire class and saunter
out. I was glad to see her edging away.

Most of the class had started grumbling, all
asking whispered versions of Didi’s question. “Who is this whack
job?”

“As a favor to Señora Hernandez-Luna, you,
burros
, shall be the first class I teach in ten years.
Because it is a continuation of all that has come before,
everything in flamenco begins with one word: ‘and.’ And so, we
begin.” She raised her gnarled hands, froze them in position until
we were all silent, then, with great gravity pronounced,
“
Y!
” and clapped. That was all. She just clapped. She
clapped out a count of twelve with odd accents thrown in, sometimes
coming down hard on the three, six, eight, and ten. Sometimes the
one, four, seven, and ten. With each change of beat she’d shout out
“Por alegrías! Por soleares! For bulerías! Por tangos!”

After several more minutes of the
unexplained clapping, the testy ballerina and some of her friends
walked out, which seemed to please our teacher enormously.

“
Bueno
, now that
las
impostoras
are gone, we can begin. Those of you who remain must
be able to hear the one essential of flamenco: rhythm, beat,
el
compás
.
El compás
is everything.
Todo, todo,
todo
. What is this?” she asked, raising her skirt, then
stamping her feet so fast they blurred and all that emerged was a
sound like a subway hurtling through a tunnel, like a hailstorm,
like the Industrial Revolution hitched to a pair of human feet. As
she stamped out a rhythm too complicated for any of us to follow,
the flesh on her face, jowls, cheeks, even her forehead, bounced
authoritatively, but she didn’t break a sweat or get the least bit
out of breath.

“This”—she pointed at the astonishing blur
of her feet—“this is
nada
!
Mierda
!”

She brought her arms up, twining her hands
like an odalisque dancing for the sultan. “All this is,” she went
on, hands and feet moving together, “is just to say something about
this.” She stopped dead and began to clap. “One, two,
three
!
Four, five,
six
! Seven,
eight
! Nine,
ten
!
El compás
! Now you.”

We tried to capture the beats, but they came
in puzzling, unpredictable bursts.

“Come on, you American
burros
, you’re
already sixteen years behind. Little Spanish girls clap patty-cake
en compás
.
Vamos!
Más fuerte!
Let me hear you!
If you’re gonna make a mistake, make a
loud
mistake!
Dígame
! Tell me something!
Dame la verdad
! Give me
the truth!”