"The Flamenco Academy" (29 page)

“We passed the grand cathedral that the
Catholic kings had built to try to outshine the Moorish rulers’
Alhambra. I shivered from more than the cold as I ran past the
gray, forbidding church. It looked too much like the tomb it was
with Fernando and Isabel lying side by side inside, the queen’s icy
smile frozen for all eternity.

“All the women crossed themselves and
touched their hair in honor of the sad story of Isabel’s daughter,
Juana la Loca. We
gitanas
loved Isabel’s daughter, Juana the
Crazy. Juana had been married to Philip the Fair, the most handsome
man in the kingdom. Poor Juana had fallen madly in love with her
prince. And how did he repay her passionate love? By betraying her
with every woman who crossed his path. Worse, he mocked her in
front of the whole court. He beat her. He made her cut off her
beautiful hair. Yet in spite of his cruelty, when he died Juana
went mad with grief. She rode through Spain in a gloomy carriage
pulled by eight horses carrying his coffin, refusing in her
insanity to bury him, hoping until her dying day that her faithless
husband would come back to life. Come back to her.

“Is it any wonder that Gypsy women love
Juana la Loca?” Doña Carlota stared right at me as if she knew that
I was as crazed by love and beauty as poor, mad Juana had ever
been.

“At the market we sat in the dust beside our
baskets and our piles of nails for so long that we looked like
beautiful flowers wilted in the sun that nobody wanted. We
pretended we didn’t notice the maids and the housewives passing us
by, kicking more dust into our faces. When Mateo cried, my mother
hiked up her blouse to nurse my new brother. As she stroked his
clean, chubby cheek, the hairs on my cheek quivered, my body
remembering when I was clean and sweet-smelling and she was gentle
and affectionate to me too.

“After another hour of the Granadina
housewives passing us by with their noses in the air, my mother
swatted at me as if this was all my fault.

“ ‘Do you piss
horchata
?’ she asked
me. ‘Do you shit
bolichones
?’ I knew what that meant. I had
to begin begging. I put my head down and wished I was back in la
Calle de los Geranios. ‘Then where is your food coming from today?
Go, you lazy Gypsy bitch! Earn your keep!’

“She shoved me toward a woman in a tight
brown skirt carrying a string basket filled with onions and
peppers. I stuck my hand out, but the woman never even looked at
me. Neither did the next shopper, a buxom maid with a metal
scapular bouncing on her breasts. A grandmother with a black scarf
tied tightly around her head also ignored my outstretched hand and
the piteous look on my face. In fact, all the Granadans were so
convincing in their pretense that they didn’t see me that I had to
touch myself to believe that I was really there.

“My mother waved for me to come to her. Her
green eyes had turned pale as olives, a sure sign that she was
furious. I had never seen her so angry, and in my fear, my ears
stopped working. All the noise of the market stopped. Gone were the
voices of our men trading horses and mules. Gone were the cries of
the cheese vendor yelling about the creaminess of his manchego.
Gone were the tinkling bells of the churro cart. I went to my
mother. As soon as I was near enough, she grabbed the soft flesh on
the inside of my arm and twisted until tears sprang into my eyes. I
wiped them away. I had learned long ago that crying only made her
pinch harder.

“She yanked me to her so that my ear was
next to her beautiful mouth and hissed into it, ‘If you can’t earn
your keep, we’ll have to sell you to the
payos
, like
Mariluna.’

“All us children lived in terror of the fate
of Mariluna. She was the last of nine children born to a family on
Sacromonte even poorer than my own. Her parents had sold her to the
owner of the brick factory. We saw Mariluna at the market, trailing
behind the family cook, her thin shoulders slumped under the weight
of the baskets she carried in either hand, her head bent, her Gypsy
defiance beaten out of her. We had heard that she slept on the
floor of the kitchen and was fed scraps from the family’s table. It
was probably a better life than the one she had had with her
family. But, in her family, everyone slept on the floor and shared
scraps. With
los payos
, only Mariluna and the dogs slept on
the floor and ate scraps.

“With the threat of Mariluna’s fate ringing
in my ears, my mother shoved me away. In panic, I ran up to the
first person who crossed my path and jabbed my palm at a señora
wearing a fancy navy blue drop-waist dress with stockings of finely
spun white lisle cotton. A cloche hat shaded her ivory skin. Her
maid, a stout, red-faced woman with stumpy bow legs, pushed me
away.

“ ‘
Para la niña,’
I whimpered,
gesturing pathetically toward my baby brother. My mother had
slumped into an equally pathetic lump in the dust. Even
chubby-cheeked little Mateo managed to appear near death.

“ ‘Don’t bother
la señora tan linda, tan
bonita
,’ my mother yelled in Spanish, smiling wanly at the
grand lady. In our own language, she hissed to me, ‘Either you get
money from this bitch or I will when I sell you to her.’

“I ran after the woman, harrying her like a
dog nipping at the heels of a bull. My eyes were a baby fawn’s, so
sweet, so sad as I begged, ‘My little brother, the baby, he’s sick.
My mother has no milk for him. We have not eaten in three days.
Un duro para la niña
,
señora
. It will bring you good
luck. You and your children.’ I sharpened my voice and hardened my
eyes as I said ‘your children.’ These words reached behind the wall
the woman put between herself and the dirty beggar.

“The grand lady’s eyes flickered to my
mother and I knew she was thinking of her own children and the
curse I might place upon them. Her pace slowed. I put back on my
pitiful beggar-girl smile, so that she would forget I had
frightened her and would remember only that she was a kind and
generous woman whom everyone admired for her saintly ways. I knew I
had her, but then the maid pushed her lady forward and swatted hard
at me.

“The maid was doing her job to swat at me,
but she hit me harder than she needed to. Hard enough to freeze my
eyes into beams of pure Gypsy menace as I snarled, ‘Good luck to
give. Very bad luck not to give. Who knows what might happen?’

“
La señora
dipped into her purse then
and put three centimos on my palm. These coins were so light they
could blow away like dried leaves and were worth barely more. This
time I was not the fawn, sweet and sad; this time in my eyes
la
señora
saw the color of her children’s flesh, dead and cold. I
spit on her money. The bitch crossed herself and hurried away.

“I gave my mother the coins and she cursed
me for letting the lady go with such a pittance. I believe that my
mother might have found a buyer for me that day if a great clanking
had not caught her attention. Everyone turned toward it. We had
seen motorcars before, but only from a distance and certainly never
in the market. The traders’ horses, already on edge from having
Mentholatum smeared on their rectums and fed coffee beans to give
them a bolt of temporary spirit, reared and snorted and fought the
traders, trying to run in terror from the clattering machine. A
coop of clucking chickens burst free and the birds escaped, wings
flapping wildly as windmills, straight into the path of what had
scared them. Turnips, beets, heads of cabbage rolled out of the
baskets shoppers dropped in their panic.

“In all the chaos, only one person remained
calm: my mother. Anyone looking at her as she wedged her thumb into
her baby’s mouth to break his suction on her nipple would have
thought she didn’t have a care in the world. Only I noticed the
centimos she’d taken from me roll down her faded pink skirt as she
stood. This told me how scared my mother really was, for money
meant more to her than air. Seeing how well she could hide her true
feelings gave me the stupid hope that Delicata was hiding her true
feelings of love for me. That when she slapped and cursed me, she
was doing it out of love, to toughen me up for a world that hated
my kind.

“I, on the other hand, could not hide my
fear of this
automóvil
. Only the week before a little boy
had been crushed with the touch of a tire. I’d seen the spot on
Calle Ángel smeared with bits of his heart and guts. So, like the
brainless chickens, in my fright I ran straight into the middle of
the road.

“The machine stopped. It did not have a top.
The driver stood up and pushed the goggles he wore back over his
head. Two white circles stood out from the dirt on his face. His
hair was the color of cinnamon. Underneath the dirt were freckles
of the same color. He was
un sueco
, a Swede. This is what we
called any of the tourists from the north who grew so heated that
they turned the color of boiled tomatoes in weather we found
chilly.

“
Perdóneme, señorita
.’ The
sueco
held out a hand covered by a glove of yellow leather
and indicated the road.
‘Con su permiso.’

“Even for a
sueco
it was strange to
speak so politely to a Gypsy. I looked around and saw the faces of
the maids and their mistresses who had, only seconds before,
pretended I did not exist. I saw the face of the elegant lady who
had dismissed me with her dead leaf money. I knew they all expected
me to ask him for money, so I stuck my hand out and asked:

“ ‘
Dame perras gordas.’

“At this, the voices in the market started
again.
‘Como una gitana.’
Just like a Gypsy. They were
surprised when
el sueco
got out of his
automóvil
. The
man was a giant. He walked over to me.

“His guide, a small Spaniard with wax on his
mustache, scrambled out of the car then and tried to pull his
employer away.
‘Señor,’
he hissed at him,
‘a los gitanos
les pasa coma a los perros; si no pegan pulgas, pegan pelo.’
This was a very common saying that everyone knew so well no one had
to repeat it except to a foreigner. ‘Gypsies are like dogs: if they
don’t leave their fleas on you, they leave their hair.’

“The tall stranger stared at me and I saw
myself with his eyes: a skinny girl with hair matted and dulled by
dust, black dirt under her fingernails and in the creases of her
hands, ground into her elbows, knees, bare feet, wearing a gray rag
of a dress. Most shameful of all, just as the guide had warned, my
legs were covered with fleabites, some of them infected, all of
them scratched until they had bled and scabbed over.

“ ‘What will you do to earn this?’ he asked
in a Spanish that sounded as if a machine were grinding out the
harsh words. In his hand gleamed the coin I had asked for,
perra
gorda
, named for the lion imprinted on it that looked like a
fat dog.

“ ‘I can dance,’ I answered as I stared at
the ground.

“The
payo
women clucked and hissed
the condemnation, ‘
Sinvergüenza
.’ ‘Shameless.’

“Yes, I thought, I am
sinvergüenza
and, grabbing the hem of my skirt, I began stamping the dust with
my feet just as Delicata had taught me, just as I’d done at every
baptism, wedding, and funeral I’d ever celebrated with my people,
just as I’d done earlier that day leaving the street of geraniums.
The difference was that, for the first time in my life, I was doing
it for strangers and, even odder, no one was singing. I had never
danced without singing. None of our people danced without singing.
Cante
was what made us dance. But my father had pounded his
songs so thoroughly into my head that, in truth, I never lacked for
a
cantaor
: So, with the memory of his hammering playing
through my head, my heels pounded into the earth, reaching down to
that place where black thoughts and blacker deeds form, even as my
arms became willow branches in the breeze while my hands became
geese flying to a cool and green land. I ignored everything—the
women of the town pursing their lips into tight lines, the stones
on the ground that hurt my bare feet. All I thought about was that,
for as long as I danced, I held the line that separated dirty
little Gypsy girls with lice in their hair from dogs.

“ ‘
Anda! Anda!’
I was barely aware of
Little Burro’s shouts, of her claps picking up a counterrhythm.
They only made me concentrate more on obeying the rhythm ticking in
my head, my heart. Urged on by Little Burro’s
palmas
, I
finished
a matacaballos
, a speed to kill a horse. Only when
I was holding my final pose, back arched, hand flung into the air,
did I notice that the stones I thought I had been dancing across
were pesetas.

“ ‘Bravo! Bravo!’ The giant blond stranger
threw more coins. Then, although his guide tried to hold him back,
he put ten more pesetas in my hand. The others in our band swarmed
forward to snatch the centimos from the dirt. The
payo
women
pretended to be disgusted even as their own palms itched for the
feel of the
sueco’s
coins. Through the crowd, I saw my
mother stand and walk away with my baby brother.

“I pushed through the Granadinas. A couple
of the old women, the ones most toughened by hard work and bad
weather, spit in my face. They pretended to do this to take off
mal de ojo
, but it would have worked just as well if they
had spit on my feet. They really did it to show their contempt. I
ran after my mother. As I passed the spot where we’d been sitting,
I saw that she had left behind my father’s basket of nails. I tried
to pick it up, but it was too heavy for me to carry. My mother was
almost out of sight.