"The Flamenco Academy" (33 page)

“ ‘What useless information,’ La Burriquita
said, when I told her.

“ ‘Find some music. A nice
cuplé
,’
the others cried, begging to listen to the syrupy ballads that were
so popular. But I shushed them and twisted the dial through spikes
of static and a blurt of music that Little Burro immediately
identified. ‘Leave it there! That’s La Bella Dorita!’ I pushed on
past the famous
cupletista
chirping about rosebuds and
butterflies and love until the dial landed on Radio Union where an
announcer in a breathless, urgent voice told us:

The army under Generalissimo Francisco
Franco has suffered heavy casualties in trying to put down the
miners’ strike in Asturias. Though severely underarmed, the miners’
skill with dynamite has inflicted a humiliating defeat on the army.
In the mountain passes they have erected giant catapults to hurl
the dynamite at the soldiers. In the cities, dynamiters creep
forward smoking cigars with which they light the sticks grasped in
their hands. Casualties have been high. Twelve hundred miners have
been killed.

“ ‘Who cares about some miners in Asturias?’
La Burriquita whined.

“ ‘You should,’ I told her. ‘If the soldiers
can shoot miners,
payo
miners, what is to stop them from
shooting girls, Gypsy girls?”

“ ‘Go back to La Bella Dorita!’

“ ‘My father says the miners are
comunistas
and they want to turn us all into atheists like
in Russia where there’s no church.”

“ ‘Pfft!’ Burriquita spit on the floor. ‘The
priests! The nuns! Black crows! My father says we should kill them
all. What have they ever done for us?’

“ ‘No! It’s
los ricos
that we should
kill and take their land.’

“ ‘Why? Who wants land? Land is just dirt.
We already have plenty of dirt.’

“I put my ear against the rough cloth of the
radio and tried to block out the sound of the women slapping and
pecking at one another like chickens, but El Bala stuck his head in
the door and yelled, ‘They’re coming! These are real
aficionados
.
Señoritos
!’
Señorito
was a magic
word. Some
señoritos
were nothing more than spoiled playboys
who pretended to love flamenco as an excuse to hold
juergas
,
orgies of drinking and whoring. But the real
señoritos
, true
connoisseurs of flamenco, were as rich in knowledge and reverence
for
el arte
as they were in duros. We had heard stories of
the real ones paying exorbitant amounts to experience flamenco,
real flamenco,
flamenco puro
.

“El Bala pointed at my mother, then at me.
‘You two, he heard about you two. He wants the authentic stuff.
None of this tourist crap, okay?’

“ ‘Who is he, this
señorito
?’“ my
mother asked.

“ ‘Why do you care? How many
señoritos
do you know?’

“ ‘I know that this one is coming to see me
dance.’

“Maybe my mother hadn’t noticed that El Bala
had also pointed at me.

“ ‘All right, if you must know... He lifted
his ruined lip in a jagged smile, pleased to announce his big
catch. ‘It is Federico García Lorca.’

In Granada, the poet was as famous as his
good friend, the bullfighter, Ignacio Mejías. We knew as much about
him as we did La Bella Dorita.

“ ‘That maricón!’ Dried Wood yelled.

“ ‘So what if he does like boys?’ El Bala
shot back. ‘You’re not pretty enough for him anyway. What are you
worried about?’

“ ‘I hear things. Don’t you know what they
say about him in the market?’

“ ‘I don’t pay attention to the gabbling of
hens.’

“ ‘You should. They say his plays are
filthy. He writes nothing but filth, this
maricón
. Worse,
though, he speaks against the government, the church. He had to run
away to Madrid because he was going to be arrested. No one can
believe he came back to Granada. The
guardias
follow him
everywhere. Men with notebooks watch him and write down the names
of everyone he speaks to. If you bring him here they will write
down our names!’

“ ‘
Buen
! Go on then.’ El Bala shooed
her away. ‘The others will be happy to take his
perras
gordas.
’

“No one moved.

“ ‘Good, then shut up!’

“We all fell silent and into that silence
came the sound of footsteps. We jumped up, certain it was them,
los señoritos
. Instead my father walked in, followed by his
uncle, an ancient guitar player named Antonio. Fear seized my
mother at the sight of the two men until El Bala said, “I invited
him. Tonight we need a real
cantaor
: A true singer of
cante jondo
. Tonight we need El Chino.’

“My father’s chest swelled, but my mother
was furious.

“ ‘I refuse to dance if he sings,’ she
said.

“Before she could say anything more, though,
El Bala yelled, ‘They’re coming!’ and shoved us all into the other
room.

“I pushed La Burriquita away and held a
corner of the curtain aside to peek out at the party as they
arrived. I knew the instant he stepped in that the man in the white
suit was a poet. It wasn’t just the way another man leapt across
the threshold to sweep the curtain aside and allow him to enter
first. Or the way the five others in the party stood back to give
him his choice of seats. No, I knew he was a poet because of his
eyes. Only a poet or the Madonna could have eyes so sad and kind
and wise. His dark hair was brushed straight back from a high
forehead. Eyebrows black as raven’s wings soared above black eyes.
A mole nestled beneath his right nostril as if one of the polka
dots had escaped from the bow tie around his neck. Everyone knew
that polka dots brought good luck. The poet would bring us good
luck.

“Lorca sat down, crossed his legs, and
looked around the cave with a half-smile on his lips as if each
copper pot, each tile, each lump on the whitewashed cave wall
pleased him immensely. He crossed one leg over the other, adjusted
the crease of his trousers, twisted the cap off his pen, and wrote
in a notebook he plucked from his pocket. While his head was bent,
the others in his group caught one another’s eyes and exchanged
smiles as if they were sharing a special event. As he was writing,
he suddenly turned his head so quickly that he caught me staring at
him from behind the curtain. He smiled. Since most adult attention
led to a swat or reprimand, I looked around to see if there were
someone behind me that the pleasant expression might be intended
for. There was no one—he was smiling at me. I smiled back.

“My father began his
temple
, the
long, drawn-out
Ay
that rose and fell and rose again as he
warmed up his throat. Tío Antonio strummed a rough
falseta
.
He played the old way, entirely with his thumb, the nail thick as
an old dog’s. As my father began singing, the poet closed his eyes
and nodded his head. His lips moved as if he were saying prayers or
having a vision.

“El Bala ordered Dried Wood to go on. My
mother crowded in beside me. As Dried Wood’s feet beat against the
floor, Lorca’s eyes flew open. He studied Dried Wood, then turned
to the woman beside him. She must have been his sister because she
was his twin except with no bow tie and no mole. All Lorca did was
arch one of his black eyebrows, and my mother and I both knew we
were in trouble, these were not tourists. They knew what they were
seeing. They knew what we knew: Dried Wood wasn’t very good.

“ ‘
Ozu
,’ my mother cursed under her
breath. She stepped out from behind the curtain and began
palmas
, clapping loudly, trying like a sheepdog to herd a
wandering sheep back to the flock. Dried Wood responded with some
footwork that was all pointless clacking and grimaces. My mother
yelled out
Óle
! This was always the cue for the tourists to
join in with some applause or, if they’d finished their sangrias, a
few
olés
of their own. But Lorca only shook his head, capped
his pen, put his notebook into his pocket, and, with a nod to the
others, stood up.

“Seeing Lorca’s disgust, my mother stepped
up, her heels drumming furiously, calling out to the guitarist, to
the singer with clapping hands and stamping feet for a
bulerías
. Tío Antonio responded immediately. My father fell
silent.

“Lorca paused while the women gathered their
coats. He saw what I saw: that every molecule of my mother’s being
was
puro, flamenco puro
. Without taking his eyes from her,
he motioned for the others to sit back down. He watched my mother
like a schoolteacher listening to a pupil reciting her lesson. When
she set up a tricky
contratiempo
with her arms, he nodded to
indicate that she’d gotten the answer right and murmured,
‘Sí,
eso es.’
My mother glanced over at me. It was as if we, she and
I, had spent the last two years surrounded by people who could
barely hear, who only understood us if we screamed and waved our
arms and acted out everything we wanted to say and, suddenly, we
had met someone who could hear the faintest whisper.

“In her exuberance at meeting such an
aficionado
, my mother forgot herself. She must have imagined
she was a girl again, shining in the gaslights on the stage of Café
Filarmónico, for she danced with a liveliness I’d rarely seen
before. I knew she could never keep up the tempo she was demanding
from Tío Antonio. She should have called for my father to sing. But
years of dancing for
payos
, for clods blind to her art,
combined with her hatred for my father, erupted in a fever that
boiled through my mother’s blood so that she wouldn’t, she
couldn’t, stop. Not to rest, not to allow my father to sing,
nothing. Her hair, which had been oiled into fat rolls beside her
ears, flew apart, swatting her red cheeks with greasy tendrils.
Sweat streamed from her face. She sucked in air with wide-eyed
gasps. Still she would not stop. Not until the coughing started.
She ignored the first hacks, turning them inward into choked
spasms. But eventually they exploded and my mother had to stop.

“Before the poet’s sister could reach for
her coat again, my mother, doubled over, had one hand plastered
over her mouth, the other one she used to wave me on. She held up
four fingers to signal to the guitarist to put his
cejilla
,
his capo, on the fourth fret, and snapped her fingers in
pitos
loud as the crack of rifle shot to the
compás
of the style she wanted me to dance, a
fandango
. But I
didn’t want to dance
por fandangos
, a folk dance for
Malagans wearing silly hats with ribbons and clacking away on giant
castanets. I wanted to dance what the poet wanted to see and he
wanted to see the real thing,
flamenco puro
. I pushed back
the curtain and entered, clapping a different time from the one my
mother was snapping.

“ ‘Keep it on the third,’ I told Tío
Antonio.

“He glanced over at my mother, La Capitana,
to see if he should play the
soleá por bulerías
I was
calling for or the
fandango
she had ordered. But she
couldn’t hear anything over the cannonade of her own coughing.

“I clapped out one
compás
, ordering
soleá por bulerías
. By the second
compás
, Tío had his
cejillo
back on the third fret and was following me. But I
didn’t make my mother’s mistake. Lorca was a true
aficionado
and true
aficionados
know that
cante
comes before all
else. I called for my father to sing. He was like me and did not
allow his feelings to overtake him, as my mother had allowed hers
to cloud her judgment. El Chino did not sing about faithless wives
or the stab sharper than a knife of a woman’s bitterness. No, he
took the puny packet of his grief and added it to the burden our
people had carried for a thousand years. Then it had weight, then
it meant something. Then Lorca was enraptured. The poet uncapped
his pen and wrote down the verses my father improvised on the spot.
Letras
with biting words about how
los payos
might
try to enslave
gitanos
but who, really, were the slaves?

“Lorca loved the clever twist of his words
that always turned
gitanos
into conquerors, rulers of a
world where
payo
fools lived by the sweat of their brows and
only
gitanos
were clever enough to live by their wits.

“In response to my father’s verses, their
message, their structure, my
taconeo
hammered out a
celebration of our people. Lorca nodded his approval of my
collaboration with El Chino. This was true flamenco and he knew
true flamenco.

“Stepping backward and silencing my feet, I
called my father back in. He was ready. He sang beautiful verses,
tragic verses that told the tale of a simple blacksmith who
journeyed to Sevilla to trade horses. Once there he was bewitched
by a dancer from Triana whose
baile
was a tornado whirling
about two precious stones, the emeralds that were her eyes. The
tornado tore his heart from his chest. He sang about how he would
die without his heart. How in claiming his heart, he’d had to steal
the dancer too. It was sad to snatch
la bailaora
from
Sevilla and lock her away in a cave, but how could a man live
without his heart? Tell him, please, and he would do it. Tell him
how he could set the dancer free and still go on. Tell him how a
man could live without his heart?

“I didn’t hear the words in my brain. I
heard the tragedy of my parents’ lives in my body and I danced it.
Slow,
a medio tempo
. I lost track of everything and everyone
around me, my mother, the poet, the fine ladies from Granada.
Because I was only aware of my father’s song and telling the sad
story of his love for my mother, I was momentarily thrown off by
the unevenness of the tiles on the floor. Then I realized that I
was dancing over coins and not flimsy centimos or even pesetas, but
duros! Heavy silver coins, some with the banished king’s portrait
on them, some celebrating the new government in Madrid, the Second
Republic.