"The Flamenco Academy" (31 page)

Doña Carlota switched to an unfamiliar
sequence and we all followed her through the new choreography like
ducklings waddling after their mother. We knew that she would
repeat the steps again and again through the class, that our feet
would follow hers as mindlessly as the duck babies followed their
mother, if only we surrendered our brains to her story. And though
weeks had gone by without a new chapter, that day, with no
preamble, she took up the tale once again.

“Since the day
el sueco
rained
duros
down upon me, my mother did nothing but work to create
her own
cuadro
, what they called a
zambra
in
Sacromonte. She was
la capitana
of our group. She was the
one who broke the astonishing news to the others: there would be no
cantaor
‘We don’t need a singer,’ she insisted. All that
los suecos
care about is
el baile
.

“ ‘But how,’ the other women asked, ‘will we
dance without a song?’

“ ‘Sing to yourself,’ my mother ordered. ‘We
will all keep time. If you have to have a song, sing it
yourself.’

“Late at night, after the women had worked
all day carrying water from the distant well and cooking over
smudgy fires of dried cactus, and after the men, who’d spent the
day sleeping, left to drink at the
colmao
, we would meet. My
mother and I taught Dried Wood, La Burra, La Burriquita, and La
Sordita all her dances. My brother Mono played the guitar. The one
problem was, of course, my father. He had forbidden my mother to
ever dance again for strangers. But each time Dried Wood whispered
to my mother in her scratchy voice, ‘What about El Chino? He is
going to find out. No one can keep a secret on Sacromonte,’ all she
would say was, ‘Leave him to me.’ Then she would go back to
pounding the floor of the cave with the cane she used to beat out
the rhythms she was harnessing us all to. Like this.
Y, uno,
doe, tray
...”

The entire class, caught up in the story,
believing that they were with Delicata on Sacromonte, moved to her
beat.

“Next to my mother, Little Burro was the
most committed to this new scheme. She had watched all of her
daughters except the youngest, La Burriquita, grow up and marry men
no better than her husband. La Burriquita was her last chance for
one of her children to have a better life than she had had and her
mother and her mother’s mother all the way back to India. Little
Burro was so desperate for something better that she took down the
green and red polka-dotted material that hung in the door opening
and with it made a real flamenco dress for La Burriquita.

“ ‘Let me show you,’ she said at our next
practice. She lifted up the dress she was working on and we all
sucked in our breath at its beauty, amazed that Little Burro’s
hands, strong enough to move her husband’s
fragua
without
any help, could stitch together a thing of such grace and
femininity.

“ ‘But this is the best part,’ she said,
smiling with pleasure at our amazement. She shook the dress out and
a length of fabric unrolled across the packed dirt floor.

“I gaped at the dress’s long train.
‘Una
bata de cola!’

“ ‘
Una bata de cola,’
my mother said,
draping the long tail of fabric over her arm. ‘With this and a
fenómeno
’—she meant my brother Mono. Though still a boy
without a whisker on his face, he could play better than any of our
men. ‘We have two of the three things every
cuadra
needs.
All we are lacking now is
un alcahuete
.’
Un
alcahuete
, a procurer, was vital since he would bring the
tourists to us. None of the women could ask their husbands because
they would immediately tell my father, who had forbidden my mother
ever to dance for another man.

“ ‘We have no choice,’ my mother said. ‘We
must talk to El Bala.’

“At the very mention of this name, Little
Burro spit on the floor and crossed herself.

“ ‘No,’ Dried Wood said, her voice even more
parched and raspy than usual because fear had dried the saliva in
her mouth.

“El Bala, the Bullet. I don’t know if he had
always resembled a bullet or only looked like one after he went
bald. But with no hair, his eyes sunk into his fat, greasy head, no
neck, a body thick and stocky from the shoulders to the ankles, El
Bala looked like a bullet. He worked as a collector for Juan
‘Coronel’ Fernandez, the moneylender. A scar from the knife of a
resistant borrower sliced El Bala’s face, making one nostril and
his top lip flap open so that his two top teeth and the inside of
his nose were exposed. At the top of the long scar was one dead,
white eye.

“ ‘Who else then?’ my mother demanded. No
one spoke. The Bullet was the only man who spoke the language of
los suecos
and who would not immediately tell my father what
my mother was planning. El Bala kept to himself. Even our men were
so frightened of him that they kept their distance.

“ ‘It is better not to catch the eye of the
tiger,’ the men said as they faded away at El Bala’s approach.

“We found the Bullet loitering outside the
colmao
wearing a shiny black suit with tan shoes and a
checked cap pulled down as low as it would go to hide his white
eye. He agreed to be our
alcahuete
in exchange for half of
everything we brought in. With no other choice my mother agreed,
warning him that he’d better fetch enough paying customers to be
worth all the money he would take from them.

“ ‘You just be ready to waggle your
jojois
because I’ll bring the tourists,’ El Bala told my
mother, using our word for rabbit, which means the same thing as
your American word for pussy. It was a word I had heard often, but
never spoken by an unmarried man in the presence of a woman. Gypsy
men had gotten a knife in the liver for lesser offenses; still, my
mother didn’t object. It was the first deal she made with El Bala,
but it wouldn’t be the last.

“On the day of our first performance, my
mother made me stand in the galvanized tin tub she used to mix
sausage while she poured buckets of water over me.

“ ‘Scrub harder,’ she ordered as I rubbed
the dirt that seemed tattooed into my skin with a slimy chunk of
agave cactus. When we finished I was cleaner than I had been since
I came from the womb. Over my head I slipped the dress my mother
had made and was buried in the wonderful smell of sizing put in the
brand-new fabric to make it stiff.

“Then, while my father slept, snoring loudly
from a late night filled with too much
aguardiente
, my
mother prepared herself. I did everything I could to keep the
chaboros
quiet. When she was ready, her hair shining with
oil, her skin pink, she was a vision as beautiful as Christ’s
mother. Fear made her even more beautiful.

“ ‘Let’s go,’ I said, pushing my mother out
the door. We’d been lucky. My father hadn’t woken.

“ ‘No,’ my mother said. ‘He will find out
where we are. If he is going to kill me, I want him to do it here.
Not in front of the others.’

“I begged her to come with me, but she had
made up her mind and woke my father. As she told him what we were
going to do, my mother took off her new dress and handed it to me.
She was naked when the first blow fell. It was usually deafening
when my father beat my mother because her screams, then ours, would
fill the cave. This time, she didn’t say a word. That scared me and
my brothers and sisters more than anything that could have
happened. We watched speechless as the blacksmith’s fists struck.
He was as angry that she planned to dance without him, without a
singer, as he was that she was going to dance at all. Her silence,
her refusal to scream, to beg, drove my father to such frenzy that
he bellowed out both his rage and hers.

“There was no thought that a neighbor would
come to our rescue. Since Cima Metales had opened, the screams of
wives being beaten had become as routine as the clang of hammers on
anvils had once been. All
gitano
tribe business was taken
care of on Sacromonte. All
gitano
family business was taken
care of in the cave.

“We, her children, watched with the eyes of
little beasts, each of us calculating how our lives would change
with our mother dead. Tears ran down the cheeks of only the
littlest ones. The rest of us were dry-eyed since we’d been on our
own for so long already. My father would have beaten my mother to
death if the most fearsome man on the mountain had not appeared at
the door of our cave.

“ ‘What are you doing, you idiot?’ El Bala
asked, as if my father were making a silly mistake that would bring
bad luck, like saying the word
lizard
or not touching iron
to ward off the evil eye or owning a black dog. Startled, my father
stopped and in that frozen moment, what we all noticed was my
mother’s body, not that there was blood trickling down it, but that
it was naked and a man who was not our father was looking at
it.

“El Bala stared at my mother as if she were
made of gold, as if he could not believe that such a treasure could
be found in a dirty cave filled with dirty children. My father
turned on El Bala, eager to drive his fists into harder flesh. El
Bala was quicker; his knife seemed to appear out of nowhere,
plucked from the air. Its blue blade glinted in the flickering
light cast by the
candiles
. Toledo steel. None of this
hand-forged Gypsy shit for a professional like El Bala. Fear of
that blade did not stop my father. Rather it was El Bala’s ruined
face—the sneer cut forever into his mouth, the blind eye, white and
eternally weeping—that stilled my father’s hand.

“I ran forward to give my mother her dress.
Standing up as straight as only a true
flamenca
can, she
pulled the dress over her head, careful to keep her blood off of
it. Then we followed El Bala out of the cave.

“In the moonlight, I could see that both my
mother’s eyes had swollen and turned purple. She touched her teeth
and smiled when she discovered none had been knocked out.

“At the doorway of Dried Wood’s cave, El
Bala inspected my mother. He took out his handkerchief, spit on it
like a mother, and gently wiped a smear of blood from beneath her
right nostril. ‘Go in and wait.’

“Dried Wood had the nicest cave of any of us
and one of the first on the whole mountain to have electricity. A
bulb burned from the ceiling. The floors were covered with a
checkerboard of white and green tiles. Around the edges of the
kitchen was a border of vines and leaves. A dozen gleaming copper
pans hung from pegs. A curtain of red and black polka dots with a
ruffle at the top separated the main room from the bedrooms in the
back. They had arranged two rows of three chairs each, leaving just
enough room in front of the chairs for the dancers. They all stared
at my mother. She looked much worse in the harsh overhead
light.

“Dried Wood finally broke the silence.
Pointing to my mother’s swollen eyes, she joked, ‘Chop up those
plums. The sangria needs more fruit.’ Everyone laughed then and
crowded around my mother, repinning her hair, snagging loops of
hair from either side of her face to cover her bruised eyes, giving
her glasses of
aguardiente
to kill the pain.

“When they’d finished, we all sat on the
straight-backed chairs borrowed for the evening, except for La
Burriquita, who stood so as not to wrinkle the dress Little Burro
had made for her with a
bata de cola
trailing behind. We
lined ourselves up next to a rickety table where six borrowed
copper cups and a pitcher of sangria waited for our first
customers. We’d gone into town early that morning to beg and steal
the fruit. The wine and
coñac
we had borrowed from the owner
of the
colmao
with promises to repay him double after that
night. The alcohol had kept the fruit we chopped up hours ago from
spoiling immediately in the heat, but tiny bubbles of fermentation
were now fizzing around the cubes of red-stained peach.

As the bubbles released their evidence of
rot, the group began to argue. With each hour that passed without
any sign of El Bala, their words grew sharper.

“ ‘I was crazy to believe in this ridiculous
plan!’ Dried Wood said.

“ ‘Who comes to see flamenco in a
cueva
so far from Calle de Sacromonte?’ Little Burro
demanded. ‘No one! El Bala is laughing at us.’ Then she called El
Bala a name that meant both cockmaster and master of the cock and,
at just the moment when Little Burro had pulled out her knife and
was threatening to go into Granada and cut off the cockmaster’s
janrelles
, El Bala threw back the curtain at the door and
gestured for the party he had in tow to enter.

“Over Dried Wood’s threshold stepped three
Englishwomen of the type who liked horses and dogs better than
people, certainly much better than they liked men. They wore long
khaki skirts and, under them, brown leather boots with thick soles
that laced up to the knees as if they were going on safari. They
each had a different cameo brooch pinned at the necks of the
blouses they covered with cardigan sweaters. They squinted their
eyes and turned their heads away as the smell of the cave hit them.
One of them took out a handkerchief and held it over her nose. And
Dried Wood’s
cueva
was fragrant compared to ours.

“ ‘Here are the suckers,’ El Bala said to us
in
Caló
, at the same time smiling like a gigolo and waving
his arm elegantly toward the women, who smiled in return, lifting
thin lips off of large, horse teeth. Little Burro’s daughter
Burriquita and I had to cover our mouths and lower our heads into
our laps to hide our laughter. My mother eyed me sharply and I
remembered my assigned role. I jumped up and showed the women to
their chairs, then brought them each a glass of sangria.