"The Flamenco Academy" (38 page)

That was all I needed to say. Singers,
cantaores
, the great ones, along with their idiosyncrasies
and egomania, have a gift for divining emotion. They witch it like
a dowser hunting water. Instead of a green bough, though, they hold
their voice over listeners until it trembles and twitches at the
deepest pools hidden in your most secret heart. Without ever
hearing Meatballs sing a note, I knew he was a great singer because
after listening to me say those few words, he waved the cart
handler away, took my hand, and guided me into the bungalow. It was
a study in good taste, New Mexico–style. A Seven Hills rug hung on
the wall, a black San Ildefonso pot occupied the place of honor
between two kachinas, a basket of fragrant piñon sat beside a
horno-shaped fireplace in the corner. Guitos beckoned for me to sit
beside him on the Carpintero-style bench with Zias carved into its
back. When I was seated, he retook my hand and pronounced the
verdict:
“Tú le amas. Tú le amas a Tomás.”

“You love him. You love Tomás.” He wasn’t
asking; he was stating the fact he saw before him. There was no
point in denying it or even in adding that I knew I was stupid.
That I’d only met Tomás once. That he didn’t even know my name.
That I should be spending my money on therapy, not flamenco
classes.

Meatballs pressed my hand to his cheek and
whispered a few words of English. “Es hokay. I luf heem too.”

And then we were girlfriends. The relief of
finally being able to talk about the person who had occupied the
greater part of my thoughts for three years was so great that I
laughed along with Guitos as if we were dorm mates in frilly
nighties.

La voz
was forgotten completely as
Meatballs spoke in tones that ranged from wonderstruck awe to
lascivious hebephrenia as he cataloged Tomás’s charms in a torrent
of fevered Spanish. “Those eyes. Those lips. That—” He cupped his
hands to indicate the Montenegro ass.
“Por Dios.”
He crossed
himself and kissed the back of his thumb at the memory. “But that,
all that is nothing,” he declared, dismissing Tomás’s beauty. A
second later, he called it back with a deep, rumbling laugh. “All
right, it is something. All right, it’s a hell of a lot. But you
know when I really, truly fell in love with this guy? When he
played for me.
Ay Santa María de Dios
. When he plays... when
he plays.
Qué monstruo. Un fenómeno.
No other
tocaor
has played like this for me. After singing with him for only a few
minutes, I could not believe what I was hearing. We were speaking.
I would say something and his response would be wise or witty.
Mocking even. So I tested him to see if he was really as good as he
seemed. I sang strange offbeats I’d never tried with any other
tocaor
and, like a compass always pointing to true north, he
held the rhythm even as he created a brilliant new
síncopa
.”

I stretched to remember the word for
syncopation as Guitos pressed the tips of his fingers together,
then shook the gathered fingers in front of his face as if pleading
for words to express Tomás’s gift. “This, all this”—he indicated
his own hair, his face, his body—“it was gone. All that is there
is”—he pounded his meaty hand into his chest, his heart, his
soul—“
this
.
This
is what he sees.
This
is what
he plays for.
This
is what he makes me show. He read my
mind. He read my heart. With his guitar, he made me show
everything. With Tomás, I could hide nothing. Every night with him
I went to confession and the black blood,
la sangre negra
,
poured out. Like no other
tocaor
—and, mind you, I have sung
with the best, the greatest guitarists on earth—but Tomás. Ah, mi
Tomasito. There is no player on earth like Tomás. I called him
Angelito. Because he was. He was my little angel. He
is
my
little angel.”

“Yes,” I whispered. “I thought I was insane.
That I had fallen in love with him because he was a phantom I could
never have.”

“I know!” Guitos exploded, the perfect
girlfriend. “I thought I had fallen in love with him just to
torture myself because he is so hopelessly straight. But no. It is
him.
Mi angelito
. He is air and rain and gold dust and all
others are mud.
Nada. Nada. Nada.
He poisons you for any
other man.”

“I know! My best friend always tells me that
I am just using him to keep the world away.”

“No! Tomás
is
the world.”

“Sometimes I think I haven’t wanted to know
anything. To keep him the perfect, unattainable dream.”

He shook his great head. “No. When you know
him, he is even more out of reach. No one on this earth will have
him, because he does not have himself.”

“Why do you say that?”

Guitos slapped both his hands over his
mouth. “No. I’ve said too much. He opened his heart to me. To me!
The beauty told his secrets to the beast. It is all I will ever
have of him. This much I will keep.” He squeezed the enormous fists
he made of his hands tightly in front of his heart to symbolize the
eternal lock he would keep on Tomás’s secrets, secrets he thought I
intended to pry out of him.

“Of course, of course. No, don’t worry. I
know nothing about him. It’s ridiculous, isn’t it? I’m obsessed
with, I love”—it felt so good to say it out loud, that I said it
again—“I love a man I met once, three years ago, a man who doesn’t
even know my name.” I giggled, giddy with the relief of pulling all
my secrets out of the closet. “I am not a mentally healthy
person.”

Guitos didn’t laugh. “Mental health? Pffft.”
He flicked his fingers, waving away the pathetic American cliché.
He leaned in close so that I was engulfed again by the smell he
carried from an older world and he whispered in his husky voice,
“
Embrujados
. Bewitched. We have both been bewitched.”

Yes, we had stepped into the same fairy tale
and been bewitched. That is why, when he said, “Tell me, tell me
about meeting Tomás,” I told him the truth as it had really
happened. “I met Tomás on a night when the earth ate the moon. His
nails were phosphorescent fairies flitting through the darkness,
plucking enchanted sounds from the strings of a guitar. A neon
rainbow splashed across his face and I escaped the police by flying
out of a window and into his arms.”

The more fantastical my telling, the closer
it approached the absolute truth of that night. Guitos nodded as I
spoke, leaning closer and closer until the long whiskers of his
sideburns stroked my cheek. He was the
tocaor
now, drawing
the truth from me, the
cantaor
.

“He led me down a street where conquistadors
ruled coffee shops and whiskey grew in a garden of green bottles. A
secret park appeared in the middle of a sleeping neighborhood. He
played
falsetas
so beautiful that the leaves on the trees
turned into hearts and rained down on me. And, on a giant’s swing,
we sailed so high that the stars blurred into streaks of silver
next to our heads.”

Guitos looked as if he’d been struck. He
dropped his head into his hands. His great shoulders heaved and
tears ran in rivulets down the tendons of his wrists.

“Guitos, please...” I put my arm around his
shoulders. He flinched and shrugged away from my touch. I backed
off.

He raised his head and brusquely squeegeed
the wetness from his face. “I want to be alone.”

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have talked about
this.”

“What you say or don’t say to me doesn’t
matter. What is meant to be, will be.” His tone was cold,
dismissive.

“I’ve offended you. I didn’t mean to—”

He shifted to turn away from me. We weren’t
best girlfriends anymore, we weren’t friends or even acquaintances
of any sort. “As I said, your intentions are irrelevant. May I be
left alone? I have a performance to prepare for?”

I muttered more apologies. Guitos didn’t
respond. Confused, embarrassed, I stumbled out of the room and
found my way back to Popejoy Hall, where Alma Hernandez-Luna tried
to control the chaos. I buried my humiliation by throwing myself
into preparations for that evening’s concert, the first of five
that would be staged over the course of the festival.

Alma was directing four different
cuadros
, troupes, each one needing its own set of lighting
cues, props, acoustics, and costumes. I was dispatched to deliver a
guitarist from Malaga to the nearest nail salon for a new set of
acrylics. It was a relief to be away from the festival for a while.
My encounter with Guitos had left me feeling as if I’d met, and
then lost, Tomás all over again.

When I returned, I was grateful to be put to
work ironing costumes. As I smoothed over wrinkles in acres of
fabric, I watched Alma through a haze of steam as she smoothed over
the inflamed egos of a dozen divas. She had to navigate through a
minefield of the thousand and one slights that flamenco performers
are apt to interpret as walkout-worthy signs of disrespect.
Watching the temper tantrums and hissy fits calmed me the way
flamenco always calmed me; volcanic emotions were made manifest and
released.

The first crack in Alma’s legendary
composure came an hour before the curtain was to go up, when she
was called away to speak to her star performer, Guitos, on the
phone. She returned to the backstage area screaming my name. The
usually unflappable Alma was utterly flapped.

With a hiss of steam, I tipped the iron up
as she rushed over, shaking her head and muttering
“cantaores,”
as if the inexplicable eccentricities of these
mercurial creatures were a personal curse upon her. “Guitos wants
you, and only you, to come to the bungalow.”

“Me? Are you sure?”

“Very sure. He was quite emphatic that he
wanted you and no one else. Was he drinking when you left?”

“No. He hadn’t touched a drop.” One of the
major duties of the flamenco celebrity wrangler was to keep our
visitors sober until concert time. After that, all bets were
off.

“Well, whatever is wrong with him, he
believes you’re the only one who can help. He’s wailing about a
pain that only you will understand. I couldn’t follow the whole
drama. Just have him here on time and on stage.”

I made the short drive to the guest
bungalows and found Guitos’s door ajar. The smell of leather from
the saddles stacked beside the bed greeted me as I slipped inside.
It blended with the fragrance of sandalwood incense.

“Hello?”

When there was no answer, I followed the
sound of chanting into the bedroom. Guitos was kneeling in front of
an altar he had assembled on the desk in the corner. Coils of smoke
rose from the sandalwood incense burning in front of a photo of a
dark-eyed Hindu man with a bindi dotted on his forehead. The
mini-bar had been savaged and an Elvis-size assortment of
prescription bottles lay scattered across the bed. None of this
seemed to have slowed the big man down very much. He rang a silver
bell and prayed incoherently to his guru. The only words I could
pick out were
“Mi Tomasito, mi ángel, mi alma.”

“Guitos?”

He swiveled around and directed his rambling
lament to me. Sobs wracking his giant body, he heaved himself up,
then crumpled onto the bed. Pill bottles and empty miniatures
bounced as his bulk hit the mattress.

I closed the door. Guitos, still sobbing,
his head buried in the pillows, patted a spot on the bed and I sat
down. After several moments of wailing, he hoisted himself up into
a sodden clump, wiped his hand across his wet face, and regained
some control.

“This is not what I thought would happen
when I came here. I dreamed that I would find the key to Tomás’s
heart here. And I have. But I see now that I will never be the one
to turn it.” He heaved a giant sigh and composed himself a bit
further. “
Mi angelito
guided me to you. Tomás and I have
shared great love in past lives. Of this I am certain—we shall be
united again after death, in
pitraloka
.” He turned to his
guru and bowed his head in the direction of the photo. “But for
now, in this current incarnation,
mi angelito
is meant to be
with...” He paused and then, with a shuddering sigh, as if the word
were his last breath of life said, “... you.”

I couldn’t speak.

“The moment you said you met him on the
night that the earth ate the moon, I knew that I was not destined
to be with him. Not in this life. You met
mi amor
on the
night when his life cracked in two, the night he soared into the
heavens with a virgin paler than the hidden moon into the
stars.”

“He told you. About me?”

“You were part of the story. One of the
signs. Part of the answer he was searching for.”

“The answer to what?”

“To himself. His life. That night, the night
he met you, he learned that he could no longer hide from what he’d
suspected for a long time,” He stared at me. The candlelight and
smell of leather, his raspy
voz afillá
, the bluish tinge of
his dark skin, they all blended together to evoke the cave on
Sacromonte where Doña Carlota had lived and given her life to the
Gypsy art, flamenco.

“Gypsies cheat, steal from, and lie to
payos
. To tell a
payo
the truth is to betray your
people. You are a
payo
. The palest of the pale of
payos
. How can I tell you the only secret I would guard with
my life, because it is Tomás’s secret?”

“I don’t tell secrets.”

He snorted a bitter laugh. “Who ever admits
that they will reveal your secret? Who ever says, ‘Tell me, tell
me, please, tell me and I promise I will betray you to the world’?
I don’t even know who you are. Why should it be you? Why should I
tell you the secret that controls Tomás’s life?”