"The Flamenco Academy" (28 page)

“ ‘No,’ she told him, ‘I will dance. In one
night I can earn more than I could make selling horseshoe nails for
ten years!’

“ ‘And who will sing for you?’ he demanded,
sputtering in his rage.

“
Cante
is where El Chino always
trapped her. The dance came from the singing and my father was the
best on Sacromonte. Also the most feared for his violent temper and
brute strength. He knew that no other
cantaor
would dare to
sing for his wife.

“Because she was trapped, my mother had no
choice but to spit in my father’s eye. My father, in turn, had no
choice then but to beat her. He beat her that day and the next and
for many days after. At the end of a week, my mother groaned every
time she breathed and we walked down the hill together and tried to
sell nails in front of the statue of King Fernando and Queen Isabel
in the Plaza of the Catholic Kings.

“My mother was right. We didn’t make enough
to stay alive and continued to live on acorns and cactus pads. Then
one day, late in the fall, when we had all begun to wonder which
one of us would die when winter came, my mother and I rose early
and were on the trail into town while a sliver of moon still hung
in the sky, then disappeared as the sky turned pink. Our breath
froze in the early morning air. Frost sprinkled the tangled forests
of cactus next to the path.

“At each cave, other women, wives and
daughters of blacksmiths whose
fraguas
had grown cold,
joined us. There was La Sordita—Little Deaf One—the wife of my
father’s uncle, a tiny sprite of a woman whose deaf ears stuck out
like an elf’s. My father’s cousin, Palo Seco, who’d gotten her
nickname, Dried Wood, because she was tall and thin and all the
juice had dried out of her. I remember walking behind her, watching
how her shoulder blades poked out the back of her blouse like the
wings of a vulture. Last was my father’s oldest sister, Little
Burro—Burrita—a powerful, high-breasted woman who, alone among all
the women, never had any bruises on her face because she had broken
her husband’s arm the last time they fought and promised him she
would cut off his
janrelles
while he slept if he ever
touched her again. By Little Burro’s side was her daughter, Little
Little Burro, Burriquita. I can’t remember the names of all the
daughters and cousins and nieces and the babies and small children
who came with us, but, all together, we were more than a dozen
strong.

“As we walked in the soft morning light, my
empty belly growled thinking of the hot
churros y chocolate
that vendors sold in the marketplace. I forgot my hunger staring at
my mother. She had on her pomegranate red skirt that had faded to a
beautiful pink, a blouse trimmed in Badajoz lace, her shawl crossed
in front of her breasts and pinned at her waist with a brooch
carved from wood to replace the fancy one she’d had to sell. My
mother bore herself like a queen. Next to her, the other women
looked like mud hens beside a swan.

“With each step, we all jangled as loudly as
the coins in a beggar’s bowl. From our ears dangled linked hoops of
tin. On our wrists were innumerable bracelets of the cheapest
silver filigree since the gold had been sold. We wore skirts with
tier upon tier of ruffles dotted in big polka dots of black on
turquoise or yellow on red, whatever colors were the brightest we
could find. The women and girls of marriageable age wore hairstyles
fixed onto their heads with tallow. Maybe because her deaf ears
stuck out so much, I remember La Sordita’s hair the best. It was
piled onto the top of her head like coils of dog droppings and
greased with pork fat until it glistened.

“At the edge of the town, I watched my
mother and her friends complete their transformation into the wild
Gypsy band the townspeople expected us to be. My mother slung the
newest baby, my brother Mateo, onto her hip, where he slumped like
a bag of potatoes. Little Burro fluffed out the curls of black hair
dangling onto her face from beneath the kerchief on her head and
shifted the basket of nails she’d been carrying on her head onto a
hip that she stuck out. Dried Wood and Little Deaf One did the
same, sticking out what little they each had in the way of
hips.

“ ‘You know what
los castellanos
like
to say,’ Little Burro announced to the group in her foghorn voice.
‘Everyone knows how to dance. Only we
gitanas
know how to
walk.’

“Even the little girls imitated their
mothers’ special Gypsy way of walking, hips swaying like a baby
rocking in a cradle. I cocked out my own little-girl hips, put the
stack of baskets I was carrying onto one, and followed the women. I
tried to make the hem of my dress twitch back and forth, the way
theirs did, swishing figure eights around their knees. But I only
succeeded in getting a stitch in my side.

“In Granada, we were a cloud of gaudy
butterflies descending upon a hill of black ants. The town women
all wore black. I saw how they shrank from us as we approached,
stepping aside, pulling their children to them, staring. I saw how
our women pretended not to notice. How their voices grew louder,
the sway of their hips looser. How they spread out to take over
even more of the narrow street. Little Burro’s harsh laughter
bounced off the tall buildings and echoed back down to slap the
women in black who walked carefully, side by side, whispering to
one another about us behind their black shawls.

“Then we entered my favorite street, Calle
de los Geranios, Geranium Street. On every balcony, the owners set
out pots of red, pink, and white geraniums. I lingered, staying
behind while the women’s party moved away and their blaring voices
and rasping laughter came back to me in echoes that grew fainter
and fainter, until the quiet of the street returned. Water dripped
from the terra-cotta pots above my head, turning the cobbles under
my feet into river rocks. Two canaries in a cage nailed to the wall
outside a second-story window began to sing. The sun shone on their
yellow feathers, but their eyes, like tiny, shriveled currants,
reflected nothing. These people believed that canaries sang better
if they couldn’t see the world beyond their tiny cages, so they put
the birds’ eyes out. They must have been right, because nowhere on
earth do canaries sing as beautifully as they do in Granada.

“Their song and the smell of that street
were like a taste I hungered for but could never satisfy. All
around me, the fragrance of geraniums scrubbed the air of the
narrow street with a scent so pure I felt purified, as if all the
dirt, the lice, the scabs had been washed away. I breathed in the
clean, geranium air and the canaries’ songs poured down on me from
the balconies overhead like miniature waterfalls. I listened until
all the other sounds in my head stopped and it was filled only with
birdsong and geranium purity.

“In the next moment, I realized I could no
longer hear even the echoes of the women. Panic overtook me as if
the beating of my own heart had stopped. I ran after the others,
unable to imagine that life could continue without my family,
mi
tribu
.

“I caught up with them as they rounded the
corner, then slowed down because they were approaching a certain
tienda de tabaco
run by a woman who hated us more than all
the women of the town put together. She was there that day waiting,
a big woman, gray hair yanked back in a bun, white apron tied over
gray cardigan sweater, sweeping the street in front of her tobacco
shop. As we drew closer, she held her arms out and blocked the area
she had just cleaned.

“ ‘Don’t walk here! Don’t bring your Gypsy
dirt, the shit from the animals you sleep with, here!’

“We all sneered at her but moved away. All
except Little Deaf One, who walked right up to the stout woman.

“ ‘What do you think you are doing!’ the
woman screamed at her.

“Of course, Little Deaf One couldn’t hear
and kept trying to pass.

“The shop owner waved her hands furiously.
You didn’t need ears to understand what she meant. We all stopped
and watched. Everyone on the street watched. People awakened in the
apartments upstairs, opened their shutters, and screamed down, ‘Go
around, you stinking Gypsy bitch!’

“These are the words we had been waiting
for. We lunged at the shopkeeper, screaming in our language,
‘Achanta la mui! Achanta la mui!’

“ ‘
You
shut your mouths, you Gypsy
whores!’ someone who understood
Caló
shouted back at us.

“My mother pushed everyone aside and stood
with her face so close to the shop owner’s that her spittle sprayed
the woman as she hissed at her, ‘Whores? You call us whores? You,
woman who stands in the doorway to make love!’

“The shop owner gasped and tried to slap my
mother, but her hand caught only the wind. Ducking back, my mother
hurled the worst Gypsy insult of all:
‘Anda ya! Que te gusta
beber mente para que se te ponga gorda la pepitilla!’

“This time the gasp came from everyone on
the street for, in perfect Spanish, my mother had accused the woman
of drinking mint tea to fatten her clitoris. The woman swung her
broom at my mother’s head. Burriquita stepped forward, grabbed the
broom handle, and twisted it out of the woman’s hand with a flick
of her thick wrist. Then Dried Wood, La Sordita, and my mother
swarmed over the shopkeeper like a flock of blue jays pecking and
screeching at the poor woman. In the uproar, only I noticed my
mother slip into the store, take a sack of Silver Horse tobacco,
and slide it beneath her skirt.

“Seeing that the townswomen were getting the
worst of things, a cry went up: ‘Call
la guardia!
’

“At this, we withdrew. The
guardia
civil
were the worst torturers of Gypsies. Only last week
Little Burro’s husband had been arrested for hunting snails on the
estate of a rich absentee landowner who lived in Madrid and both
his thumbs had been broken. We backed down the street shouting
curses and fixing
mal de ojo
on the shopkeeper until we
turned the corner.

“Several blocks later my mother called a
stop and pulled out the bag of Silver Horse. The women, who weren’t
allowed to smoke in front of their men, eagerly rolled up the
tobacco in whatever scraps of newspaper they could find. By the
time we were finished smoking our cigarettes, the story had
changed: we weren’t chased away, we’d left in triumph after we’d
beaten
los payos
again with our quick wits and even quicker
fingers. The proof was the cigarettes we smoked.

“This is the way Gypsies see the world.
Always, always, always, we must be the ones who outsmart the
payo
. To celebrate, my mother started
las palmas
.
Just a little
sordas
, a muffled handclap with the palm
cupped, not the loud
secas
, dry, clacking on the flat
palm.

“My mother clapped...” Doña Carlota waved at
the class and they clapped with her.

“I clapped
contratiempo
.” She slapped
out a counterrhythm and pointed at me to pick it up.

“Then we started
los pitos
. Dried
Wood was as good as her name, her fingers sounding like old sticks
cracking as they clicked together.”

Doña Carlota’s twisted fingers snapping
together rang out. She pointed at Didi, who was good at imitating
the rifle crack of La Doña’s
pitos
.

“Little Burro started the
jaleo
.
Vamos ya!
”

La Doña didn’t have to repeat the
exclamation a third time—the class immediately echoed Little
Burro’s
jaleo
.

“Little Deaf One, who could feel rhythm, was
the first to raise the ruffles of her skirt and tap out an
answering rhythm with her heels as she danced down the street.

“All the rest of us shouted encouragement at
La Sordita.
‘Vamos ya!’

“La Burriquita was next to take her turn
dancing. Then Palo Seco. Me. Then my mother. She went last because
everyone knew she was the best. We were all
en compás
with
her. The rhythm held us together so tightly that we became one
person. One person with five pairs of dancing legs and five pairs
of clapping, snapping hands.”

In the mirror of Doña Carlota’s studio I saw
that my classmates and I, so mesmerized by the story that we were
following Doña Carlota without thinking, had all become sassy Gypsy
women. We swung our hips, happy to be ostracized by the straitlaced
townswomen who were threatened by our wild ways. We were rebels. We
were bad. Didi caught my eye, grinned, and shook her raised skirt
at me playfully.

The class made a wild
jaleo
, yelling
back every new cheer Doña Carlota taught us:
“Arza! Así se
baila!”
When we were really moving, Doña Carlota pretended to
fan her face as she called out,
“Agua! Agua!”

We didn’t need a translation to know that
our teacher was calling for water because we were so hot. Doña
Carlota calmed the pandemonium with little more than one circle of
her arm. We clapped quiet
palmas sordas
as our feet
automatically stayed
en compás
while we waited, expectant as
good children in pajamas, teeth brushed, for the story to continue.
La Doña did not disappoint.

“The sun and the peasants from the sierra
were thronging in as we reached the center of the city. The air
echoed with the clang of cattle bells, the braying of mules and
donkeys loaded with casks of wine and oil, baskets of fruit and
vegetables from the country. A customs official in his belted
uniform stopped everyone who passed, poking their bundles,
searching for contraband. We strode like queens through the
Bibarrambla, where the last Moorish king had watched bullfights and
jousts.

“From Bibarrambla, we wound our way to the
cathedral, where the herb sellers hawked their wares:
flor de
azafrán
for headaches and sadness;
manzanilla
for
stomachaches and childbirth pains;
genciana
for men’s
disease;
azahar de naranjo
for bad temper;
alenjo
for
lunacy;
siete azahares
for boils and earache.