"The Flamenco Academy" (26 page)

“My mother fell into a dream so deep as she
spoke that I could smell the cigars, the polish on the gentlemen’s
shoes, the pomade on the dancers’ hair.

“ ‘We performed on stages, proper stages
raised high above the crowds. At our feet were rows of light,
flames of gas, so that every move, every turn of an arm, every
twist of a wrist, shone as if we dancers were made of gold. And the
floor of the stages? Wood. No Gypsy had ever danced on wood until
the cafés opened. For the first time, we could hear the rhythm
pulsing through our bodies. That I loved. The sound of my feet
stomping, pounding so fast that
los tocaores
could barely
keep up on their guitars. Luckily, I was a young girl, not yet of
marriageable age, so they let me get away with my wild
zapateado
. If one of the older dancers, my mother, any
woman, tried to shake the dust from those wooden floors with
footwork like mine, oh! Then they would start. ‘Not feminine
enough. Destroying
el arte
. Too masculine.’ And the women
would go back to their delicate
brazeo
, standing rooted on
one spot, twining their arms with all the fire of ivy growing.
Cows, stupid cows.
Los señoritos
might say they were true
aficionados
, that they only liked the old-style dancing. But
who did they hire? Who did they want for their private parties? Who
was the princess of the
cafés cantantes
? Yes, that is what
they called me, La Princesa, and I would have been the queen, La
Leona. I would have ruled over that world if only, if only—’

“ ‘What about the decorations?’ I cut my
mother off. Too many times all the wonderful stories had been
derailed by ‘if only.’

“ ‘Ah, the decorations.’ She would sigh,
close her eyes as if she were smelling the most delicious smell,
and begin again, calm then as she remembered the
cafés
cantantes
. ‘Always, the cafés were decorated in the most
elegant style. Heavy curtains of ruby velvet hung at the sides of
the stage. Giant mirrors in frames of gold made the big halls
appear even larger. In front of the stage were rows of chairs. Each
chair had a tray fastened to the back so that the customer would
have a place for his
caña
of wine. Some of the cafés had
little tables. Above all the spectators on the ground floor were
boxes with armchairs, just like a theater. Up there, in the boxes,
los adinerados
didn’t drink the little caña of wine for
thirty-five centimos like the riffraff on the floor. No, they
bought wine by the bottle, four and five bottles at a time. On the
walls were posters that celebrated all the beautiful places of
Sevilla. La Giralda, the golden tower, Sevilla’s cathedral, almost
as large as St. Peter’s in Rome. All the beautiful, beautiful
places of Sevilla. All the beautiful places I will never see again
because—’

“ ‘What dances did you perform?’ I hurried
to ask before my mother’s dreamy mood sank beneath her sadness.

“ ‘On those wooden floors that were like
dancing on a drum? All of them. All the dances that we
gitanos
de Triana
had only danced for ourselves before, they all burst
forth in the gaslight.
Tangos, tientos, bulerías, alegrías
.
These were the easy ones, the light, happy ones for weddings and
baptisms that the audiences liked right away. But we also brought
out the slow, sad ones.
Los jondos
that we danced at
funerals,
siguiriyas
,
soleás
,
peteneras
, these
we danced too, but only the truest of the
aficionados
liked
them. Four performances a day and, with each one, the public begins
to like
el baile
a little more until one day the singers are
no longer the stars. It is the dancers the public come for.

“ ‘Even worse, the
tocaores
, the
monkeys plucking away at their guitars, are starting to be noticed.
One day, some player in some café plucks out a particularly sweet
falseta
and what happens? The audience applauds. Applauds a
guitar player? That had never happened before and now all the
guitarists want their moment in the gaslight. Ramón Montoya, Luis
Molina, Habichuela el Viejo, Manolo de Huelva, Javier Molina. They
all became soloists, each one trying to outplay the other. But the
worst rivalry of all was between Paco Lucena and Paco el Águila.
The first Paco played and the audience went wild. To show his
disdain for his rival, the second Paco pulled a glove out of his
pocket, put that on his hand, and played even better than the
first! Well, First Paco can’t let this stand, so he takes the sock
off his foot, puts it on his left hand, and plays a solo!’

“My mother laughed at the memory, but the
unusual sound of laughter echoing off the walls of the cave
startled her. She remembered where she was and the cave became her
prison again. My mother slapped my head and pushed me away, glaring
as if I were her jailer, the one who had imprisoned her. I suppose
I was, her first child, the one who had cost her her virginity.
Because, really, what decent Gypsy man would have had my mother
after my father kidnapped and raped her?”

“Time to step up the program,” Didi said,
stuffing shoes and skirt into the bag she heaved onto her shoulder.
Class had just ended and, as usual, we’d all waited until Doña
Carlota had left. That day I wanted to stay in the studio for
hours, savoring and committing to memory the new chapters of
Tomás’s family history. But, almost as if she were deliberately
breaking the spell, Didi yanked me out of the classroom and dragged
me down the hall toward the faculty lounge with its emphatic sign,
NO STUDENTS.
ESTUDIANTES PROHIBIDAS
. We waited until Señora
Martinez, who taught castanets, punched the code into the keypad
and entered. A second before the door closed on its automatic lock,
Didi sprinted ahead and grabbed it.

“What the hell are you doing?” I hissed,
refusing to enter the teachers’ inner sanctum.

“I thought the whole idea of this flamingo
thing was to get to Mystery Man.”

“Shut up,” I whispered, prickling with the
sensation of being watched, heard not just by the unseen audience
of one I had played my life to ever since that night at the Ace
High but by the woman I’d made his proxy, Doña Carlota, who was
probably still in the faculty lounge.

“Come on. The very least we can do is find
the old lady, maybe tail her back to Santa Fe. View the boyhood
home.”

“No!” The thought, the remotest hint of
intruding on Tomás’s world to that extent before I was absolutely
ready, appalled me.

“What?” Didi challenged. “You changed the
mission without telling me? You seriously want to be a dancer now
or something? Nice of you to let me know. Should I find someone
else to do my books?” Didi held the door open for me. Terrified
that if I didn’t do something to end this discussion, she would say
his name out loud, I stepped through.

“Girls.” Señora Martinez stopped us. “You
know you’re not supposed to be in here.”

“Oh, sorry,” Didi said as she fished her
wallet out of the shoulder bag. “Doña Carlota left this in the
studio and we wanted to catch her.”

“
Andale, pues
! She just left. Out the
back way.
Ten prisa, chica
!”

Didi rushed through the dressing room to the
back door and pushed it open. I peered around the edge of the door
and caught a glimpse of Doña Carlota being helped into the backseat
of a meticulously maintained old Buick by an elderly man. As he
dipped his head, his silver hair glinted in the sun like a sheet of
tinfoil. There was a timeless formality to his every gesture as if
he’d been transported, not just from another continent, but from
another time entirely. His face was oddly unplaceable. Not quite
Hispanic, not quite Native American, not quite Anglo. His profile
could have come off an ancient Roman coin. He slid behind the wheel
in the front seat and drove away. Didi ordered, “Memorize the
digits!”

We stepped outside and watched the Buick
disappear.

“Whoa! A driver,” Didi said. “Major diva
action. Well, at least we know why the old lady ordered us to let
her leave first.”

“What do you mean?”

“She doesn’t especially want anyone seeing
that she’s either too feeble or too prissy to drive.”

“I don’t know about that.”

“Hey, don’t get confused. It’s the
great-nephew or ward or whatever you’re in love with. Not her.
Shit, if we didn’t have to park halfway to Gallup, we could follow
her home.” I was deeply grateful that there was no way Didi could
engineer such detective work.

The usual Friday afternoon crowd was
gathered on the front lawn outside the academy to listen to the
guitarists practice their
falsetas
—the sweetly lyrical
melodies sprinkled atop flamenco’s driving rhythms—and smoke harsh
cigarettes imported from Spain. The flamenco program’s inner circle
clustered around Liliana, the Christina Aguilera look-alike, whom
Didi had correctly identified as the “head flamenco bitch.” I
recognized a few other standouts from the program: Liliana’s chief
henchbabe, Yolanda Gutierrez, a good but not great dancer; Adriana
Ebersol, a ballet swan with a major eating disorder and a
reputation for technical perfection served up with a side of
soulless
güera
attitude; Paz Diaz, probably the best dancer
but not most-likely-to-succeed because she had a rabbitty overbite
and was stocky. Everyone paid a lot of lip service to how shape and
size didn’t matter in flamenco, that some of
el arte
’s
greatest performers were old and fat. Yeah, right. No, flamenco
wasn’t as body-obsessed as ballet, but still, the stars all had the
right look and that look was thin and dark.

~ ~ ~

“Could I bum one of those?” Didi asked a
tall guy with broad shoulders and a ring of thorns tattooed around
his biceps. His name was Jeff, a rock guy picking up a few flamenco
chops. Good-looking in a rock ‘n’ roll way, tall, thin, long blond
hair, the top part pulled back into a ponytail, he would have been
perfect for Didi except that he was Liliana’s boyfriend.

Jeff handed her a Ducado and she did that
forties movie thing of letting him light it for her leaning in
close and looking up into his eyes. Didi and Jeff chatted in
Spanish for a few minutes while she smoked. Liliana shot daggers at
Didi when she made him laugh.

“Laters,” he said to Didi, before sauntering
over to Liliana.

“He seemed interested.”

“Jeff?” She glanced over her shoulder and
caught him staring after her. “Yeah, he’ll be useful. He’ll help us
a lot more than the
pinche compás
ever will.” She smoked the
rest of the Ducado as if she were furious at the cigarette and
wanted only to incinerate it. What she was furious at was (a) not
being the center of attention and (b) Jeff walking away from
her.

Will Thomas, the accompanist for our class,
had taken up a spot by himself beneath a middling-size spruce off
to one side and was playing a beautiful
falseta
. Some of the
girls in our beginner’s class were scattered around the edge of the
lawn watching Liliana and her group practice. Blanca, who’d
encouraged me in class, sat by herself, reading.

“Come on,” Didi said, heading toward Will.
“Time to start our own cool group.”

Will barely glanced up as Didi positioned
herself in front of him and began working through some of the
combinations Doña Carlota had been teaching us. Like most everyone
else on the lawn, Will was smoking a Ducado, the official sign that
he was applying for membership in the hardcore flamenco club.

I sat down and watched Will play, watched
his hands on the strings. Of course, they made me think of Tomás’s
hands flowing like that across silver strands, coaxing beauty and
passion from them. I thought of his hands on my face, my back,
pulling me to him.

“You were really good in class today,” Will
said, barely looking up at me.

“Oh.” I was surprised that he knew who I
was. “Thanks.”

“Who else do we need?” Didi whispered to me.
“The Great White Hope?” she asked, nodding toward Jeff. “I couldn’t
agree more,” she said before I could answer. “Take over here.” Didi
was already striding away before I stood and took her place,
practicing the
bulerías
sequence the old lady had shown us
last week.

“That’s an amazing story she’s been
telling.”

“Really.” Will couldn’t talk and play and
his
compás
faltered a bit. Enough to throw me off. I clapped
to get him back on the beat.

He listened, nodding, then lowered his head
and started playing again, betraying his roots in classical music
with lots of tremolos and arpeggios that seemed the absolute
antithesis of flamenco. He finished a tricky run and glanced up at
me. Only because he wore a look I’d seen on my own face once when I
was thinking about Tomás and caught a glimpse of myself in a window
did I realize: Will likes me. Then I heard all the tremolos and
arpeggios for what they were: offerings. I checked to make sure
Didi was occupied. She was executing a tricky maneuver, luring Jeff
away from Liliana to play for her. I glanced around to make certain
that no one else was within range of hearing before I asked as
casually as I could manage, “Doesn’t the old lady have an adopted
child? Some kind of guitar prodigy?”

“Tomás?” Will pronounced the name with an
ease so studied that it told everything about Will and Tomás and
their places in the guitar hierarchy. Will was a roadie and Tomás
was the star whose name had enough weight to be worth dropping.

It was nearly unbearable hearing his name
spoken. I glanced around feeling nervous, exposed. As much as I
wanted to hear more, I also wanted to run and hide. But Will seemed
safe. It was impossible to imagine that he had any direct
connection to Tomás. All I could manage to say was “Yeah.”