"The Flamenco Academy" (34 page)

“In spite of the coins, though, I didn’t
make my mother’s mistake. I didn’t keep hammering my feet faster
and faster like a cheap tin windup toy gone mad. I took a bold step
back to signal what I wanted to the guitarist. Then I enfolded the
wild calliope of movement, scooping it out of the air with my arms
and drawing it all back in. In a split second, I froze the motion,
holding it ticking inside of me.

“The poet’s group pounded their hands
together, but he silenced them, both his hands thrown out to stop
every sound. Now he watched. Now he listened with his eyes, waiting
to learn if I had anything to say. I had waited all my life for
this. I opened my arms and released the motion, let it whirl me
away until I was a tornado, until I had whirled every heart in that
cave out of every chest and claimed them as my own.”

Doña Carlota clapped her hands with a sharp
crack like a hypnotist waking his subject from a trance. “That’s
all the time for today! Next class we talk about my friend,
Federico García Lorca.”

Outside, Didi ran past. “Gotta blast,” she
yelled back at me. “Jeff’s helping me put a new piece together.”
She stopped. “You wanna come? You’ve hardly heard any of my new
stuff.”

I shook my head no. All I wanted to do was
stand in the sun and enjoy the spell Doña Carlota’s story had cast
over me.

“What? You’re just going to hang here and
pretend that you’re the emerald-eyed dancer and the heart you steal
belongs to Tomás Montenegro?”

“No.” She was, of course, exactly right.
That was precisely the fantasy I was looking forward to.

“Oh great,” she said sarcastically. “Then
that means you’re actually planning to do something real about the
Tomás obsession.”

I pulled a foot out of the sandals I’d
changed into and displayed my calluses, bunions, and blisters like
they were merit badges. “And these aren’t real enough?”

“Hey, girls who cut themselves get real
scars.”

“That is so ridiculous! That is a completely
different thing al—” But before I could finish saying
altogether
, Didi left, waving her fingers at me over her
shoulder as she went.

More to prove to myself than Didi that she
was wrong, I moved without thinking. Thinking was a problem for me
since it always led to nothing, to me daydreaming in the sunshine.
So I didn’t stop long enough to think, I simply made myself run to
the faculty parking lot just in time to see Doña Carlota’s driver
pull up to the back of the academy, jump out of the Buick, and race
around to open the back door for the old lady.

Because it was the last thing on earth I
wanted to do, I called out, “Doña Carlota!”

It is possible that I hadn’t called out
loudly enough for her to hear me. That I’d only called out loudly
enough to say that I’d done it. That I had tried. But the handsome,
silver-haired driver with the unplaceably ancient face did hear me.
He stopped and looked my way. The thrill of recognition that I had
always expected when looking into Doña Carlota’s face hit me in the
instant my eyes met this old man’s. The eyes. It was like looking
into Tomás’s eyes. The ridiculous suspicion that he might be
related to this old man was what alerted me to how dangerously
overwrought I was. If the driver had not already been turning Doña
Carlota’s attention my way, I would have fled. But she was
beckoning me to come to her and the driver was walking away to give
us privacy, so I stepped forward.

“Metrónoma, yes, what is it?” Her tone, her
expression, her bearing, all the eloquence a great dancer can bring
to bear expressed how highly irregular and irritating my appearance
was.

What would my lie be? A question about
Lorca? About the
bulerías desplante
? Stopping her after
class when she’d made it quite clear she didn’t want to be stopped
after class or any other time was bad enough. Now I had to compound
the offense by asking an idiotic question. Nothing I could say
would be any worse than the truth. So, because, it was the one word
always at the center of my thoughts, I blurted out the name that
was all questions rolled into one, “Tomás—”

“Tomás?” She cut me off, leaping at his name
with the same ardor I spent my days hiding. “What have you heard?
Do you know something? Has he been in contact with you? Someone you
know? He’s sent a message through you? He’s done that before. Sent
messages through unlikely sources. Where is he? Do you know where
he is?”

“No, no, nothing like that. I don’t really
know him. I—”

“Ah, I see.” The moment of excitement, hope,
was gone, replaced by an Old World knowing that added my name to
what was surely a very long list of breathless girls. “But you
would
like
to know him, is that it?”

I shook my head no. This was my nightmare. I
had tipped my hand. This was what I had decided from the very
beginning never to do: I was a groupie. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean
to bother you. Have a good weekend.” I was babbling. I was an
idiot. I backed away, twiddling my fingers in a silly wave, ducking
my head to keep her from seeing how my cheeks now scorched with
embarrassment.

“Wait. Come back. You just did the one thing
you have to do in flamenco: you told me something. When you said my
nephew’s name, you showed me more about yourself than you’ve
revealed this entire semester. That,
that
is what flamenco
is all about. And that is what you never do and what your friend
does all the time. Show yourself. Tell me something. Tell me
something true.
Digame la verdad
.”

“Didi’s not telling the truth. She hasn’t
even told you her real name.”

“You think that matters? You think it
matters that her truth is lies? I will tell you something.” She
waved me closer. “You could be a great dancer.”

My heart clutched. These were astonishing
words from a woman whose most fulsome praise was usually
“No es
feo.” It’s not ugly.

“But...”

Of course there was a
but
.

“... you never will be. Technically, you are
estupendosa
. But great?”

She shook her head and muttered,
“Nunca,
nunca.”
Never, never. “Why? Why will you never be great?
Because of her.”

There was no point in even pretending that I
didn’t know who “her” was.

“Flamenco is
yo soy
.” The gravel of
the parking lot crunched beneath the old lady’s foot as she stamped
the earth, taking, demanding her place on it with the essential
Spanish declaration: I am. “Flamenco is
yo soy
. You are
waiting for her permission to be. Why? Why do you stay in her
shadow? She is too big a tree. You are barely a sapling. You will
never have enough light because you will never have enough courage
to grow past her and reach the sun.”

She leaned in even closer, close enough that
I smelled Maja soap, lavender, sweat, and, underneath, another odor
I couldn’t identify. It contained elements of the sweetish
fragrance Daddy had about him toward the end, plus the spike of
what I’d come to identify as an almost hormonal surge when Didi’s
ambition went into overdrive, all combined with the dusty scent of
ancient books and rooms that have been closed for a long time. “I
too once had a friend like Ofelia. From her I learned a secret, a
secret that you must learn.”

Suddenly, what she had to tell me seemed
more important than anything, more important in that moment than
even Tomás.

“She needs you more than you need her.
Because of that, she will never release you. You will have to
either live forever in her shadow or—” She made a swift, brutal
hacking motion, an ax hacking down a tree.

How
, I wanted to ask her,
does a
small tree kill a big tree?

But, as if she had literally slashed through
some vital energy source, the gesture seemed to have exhausted Doña
Carlota. Without the bristling nimbus of energy that always whirled
around her, she shrank into herself, suddenly old and a bit
confused. Mumbling, she turned away. Abruptly, her voice rose and
she declaimed, “What had to be done, had to be done. Rosa, what
other choice was there?”

“Excuse me? Doña Carlota, did you say
something?”

But when she looked up again, her eyes were
glazed. She hadn’t been speaking to or even seeing me.

Her driver, sensing her disorientation,
rushed forward. Murmuring soft words in Spanish, he led her toward
the car. Before he closed the door, she turned to me and held a
quivering hand out as if she were offering something unspeakably
precious.

Or asking for it back.

At Doña Carlota’s next class, we found a
note taped to the studio door saying we were to meet in the
academy’s main classroom. Once we’d settled in along with all of
the other flamenco students, the director of the program, Alma
Hernandez-Luna, swept in, brimming with an illegal amount of
energy. “I have some good news and some bad news. The bad news for
those of you in the beginning class is that Doña Carlota had a
minor stroke yesterday and though the damage is not serious, she
will not be able to finish what remains of the semester. I will be
taking over her classes.”

“What?” I gasped. She hadn’t even gotten
close to Tomás’s part of the story.

Didi shrugged. “End of story time.”

“The good news is that we have with us today
the great
flamencologista
, Don Héctor Arribe y Puig. Don
Héctor has come to this country to write the history of flamenco in
the New World. Let’s all welcome our distinguished guest, Don
Héctor Arribe y Puig.”

As Don Héctor took the podium, Didi turned
to me and whispered, “Hercule Poirot.”

She was right. Don Héctor was the very
embodiment of Agatha Christie’s hairnet-wearing detective. The
professor was a diminutive man of a type that had either never
existed in or had vanished long ago from the New World. A pince-nez
would not have looked out of place clamped across the bridge of his
thin nose with its quivering nostrils. More than that, though, Don
Héctor Arribe y Puig was the embodiment of the compleat flamenco
aficionado
of the obsessive-compulsive type. There is no
exact equivalent in our country to the true, the
puro
,
flamenco
aficionado
. The comic book collector, the baseball
trivia nut, the Civil War reenactor, the
Star Trek
fan, yes,
the
aficionado
is all of those things but more. With
flamenco’s emphasis on
el puro
, its love of bloodlines, the
mystical handing down of
el arte
through families,
preferably Gypsy families, the die-hard
aficionado
also has
something of the racetrack handicapper, the genealogy authority,
and the slave-owning plantation owner about him as well.

Don Héctor started off by drawing a great
tree on the blackboard. With much emphatic underlining, he labeled
the roots, INDIA. Brushing chalk dust from his hands, he turned to
his audience with a pugnacious tilt to his little chin like a
backstreet brawler ready to take on all comers. He seemed deflated
when we copied the tree into our notebooks without a question.

“The long debate over where
los
gitanos
originated is over. A study at Hospital Puerta de
Hierro, Madrid, Spain, examined the HLA class I and class II
antigen distribution in a sample of seventy-five Spanish Gypsies
and seventy-four Spanish non-Gypsies. They found that Gypsies have
a statistically significantly higher frequency of these antigens,
which proves that Spanish Gypsies are closer to Indian Caucasoid
populations than to the Spanish non-Gypsy population?”

He looked around, expecting a fierce
reaction to what he obviously considered a bombshell revelation.
All he saw were students either dutifully scratching down what he’d
just said or muffling yawns. I, however, was electrified. He was
talking about the exact issues of blood and authenticity that
haunted Tomás. This was the problem I could solve for him, the one
that would win his love. I scribbled frantically as the professor
continued.

“Gypsies migrated from or were cast out of
India around the eleventh century. Records exist of their arrival
in Spain as early as 1425. They named themselves Children of the
Pharaoh, Egyptians,
los egipcianos
, a label that eventually
became
los gitanos
. Many of the Gypsy chiefs called
themselves
conde
or
duque de Egipto
, count or duke of
Egypt, and traveled with their bands under forged letters of safe
conduct, claiming to be pilgrims. They carried out this fabrication
for so long that even the
gitanos
themselves forgot that
they were not really Egyptian pilgrims, sons and daughters of the
pharaohs.

“After the Reconquest of Spain in 1492, when
the Moors were driven from the peninsula, an official persecution
began against all non-Christian groups. The same year that America
was discovered, Jews and Gypsies became hunted people. They were
either expelled or forced to hide their identities. The Jews became
conversos
, practicing their religion in secret, or they
fled. Gypsies had nowhere to flee.

“For three centuries, Gypsies were subject
to laws and prejudice designed to eliminate them from Spain.
Settlements were broken up; Gypsies were required to marry
non-Gypsies. They were denied their language and rituals as well as
being excluded from public office and from craft membership. In
1560 Spanish legislation forbade
gitanos
from traveling in
groups of more than two. Gypsy dress and clothing were banned.
Around this same time there were nearly a million Gypsy slaves in
Eastern Europe, and Holy Mother Church owned two hundred thousand
of them.

“Not surprisingly, Gypsies were driven into
a permanently submerged underclass from which they are still
emerging today. Just as hardship, however, nurtured the blues music
of your persecuted African Americans, in my country it led directly
to the creation of flamenco song, dance, and guitar.