"The Flamenco Academy" (39 page)

It was easy to answer in the way he would
understand. It was more than easy. All I had to do, for one moment,
was to stop reining in my obsession and it ran away with me.
“Because I care more about him than I do myself. Because for three
years I have devoted my life to becoming who he would fall in love
with. Because he is more essential to my happiness than life.
Because I am sick with love for Tomás Montenegro and I will die if
you do not give me the cure.”

“When you fall in love with
un
flamenco
, you fall in love with his art, with his people. In
America you tell each other the lie, ‘Oh, the color of a person’s
skin. It doesn’t matter.’ In flamenco, we don’t tell that lie.
Blood matters. To be the best, you must have the best blood, the
blood of the pharaohs. You must be Gypsy. And don’t say, ‘Oh, what
about Paco de Lucía?’ ”

He waved away the name of the world’s most
famous flamenco guitarist.

“Pffft. Paco is great. The greatest of the
decade. But for
payos
only. In
el flamenco puro, puro,
puro,
for those who are truly
enterao
, Paco
no dice
nada,
he says nothing. Do you understand this? Do you
understand how even such a one as Paco de Lucía will never be
accepted, truly, truly accepted, because he is a
payo
?”

“Yes, I know. In my classes, I am invisible.
I don’t have
el arte
in my blood. I will never have it. I
can study flamenco for the rest of my life and I won’t have it. I
don’t care. I study for Tomás. No other reason.”

Guitos nodded, considering. He dropped heavy
lids over his eyes, turned from me, and bowed in the direction of
his guru’s photo. Several moments passed as he prayed silently. He
opened his eyes, said one word, “
Sí
,” and began to tell me
the story I’d fallen into on the night I dropped into Tomás
Montenegro’s arms.

“When Tomás appeared on the scene in Madrid
seven years ago, speaking his beautiful Spanish with words from the
seventeenth century, he was a very young man. He came with a minor
reputation. Good enough to get work in the tourist clubs. Word
spread quickly, though. First
los aficionados
went so that
they could dismiss this latest pretender and acquire a new object
for their finely attenuated mockery.

“But they did not come away laughing and
soon Tomás was playing in the best flamenco clubs in the world, El
Corral de la Morería, La Torre del Oro, Casa Patas. He was
accompanying classes at the greatest flamenco studio of them all,
Amor de Dios. He was heralded throughout the flamenco world. At
last, a real, a true
flamenco
from the New World, come back
to us like an echo from the conquistadors five centuries ago. An
ocean, a continent was between him and the sources of
el
arte
, yet in spite of his isolation, he played with
corazón
gitano
.
Alma gitano
.
Pasión gitano
. How could
this be? Those of us who’ve given our lives to
flamenco puro
knew it had to be a lie. That year I, along with Chi Chi, the queen
of
el baile gitano
from Jerez de la Frontera and El Pulgar,
the last, true
calé
, were on the selection committee to pick
the best, the purest, the most flamenco of all flamenco artists to
perform at the Sevilla Biennale. Everywhere we turned, someone was
telling us about this
tocaor
we had to consider, this Tomás
Montenegro.

“Eventually we surrendered. We had to learn
who the upstart from the New World was. So, late on a Tuesday, the
first day of the flamenco weekend, we arranged to meet this
fenómeno
. We had already decided that he was a fraud. We
intended not only to disqualify him from consideration for the
sacred biennale, but to ensure that he would never play again at
any respectable club. The heart and soul of our art hung in the
balance. For this reason, we set the meeting at Restaurante
Sonrisa, a tourist spot where they slam a bowl of gazpacho in front
of you and some abomination in a red dress clacks her castanets in
the imitation flamenco that Franco foisted on us after the war. The
choice of Restaurante Sonrisa was an insult to the pretender and
the three of us were quite pleased with our little joke.

“The joke was on us when Tomás appeared and
the first words from his mouth as he looked around at the Japanese
businessmen and the dancer in a polka-dotted dress were, ‘I know a
spot that’s not far from here and not for
guiris
.’ Chi Chi,
El Pulgar, and I were impressed not just that he knew the
Caló
word for outsiders, but that he led us to ¡A Jalar!, a
dive popular with the Triana crowd,
calé
from Sevilla—a
rough, working-class place, exactly the sort of place where Carmen
Amaya herself might have danced barefoot as a child.

“Because I did not want to be recognized in
the company of a fraud, I had taken care that night to wear a
fedora that covered the top half of my face and a muffler that
covered most of the bottom. In this way, I slipped unnoticed into
¡A Jalar!

“ ‘Eh,
churumbel
!’ the proprietor
greeted Tomás, yelling to be heard above the racket. Even if the
owner had not called him ‘kid’ in
Caló
, we, Chi Chi, El
Pulgar, and I, would have known the owner was Gypsy by the gold
chains glinting against the masses of black Gypsy hair, poking from
the top of his lime-green silk shirt. He stared at us suspiciously,
mumbled something in Tomás’s ear. He brightened when Tomás
whispered something back to him.

“ ‘Ah, you are
calé
,’ the owner said,
grabbing my hairy Gypsy hand in his hairy Gypsy hand. ‘Why didn’t
you say so?’ So it was Tomás who had to vouch for us! Us, we three
who were there to be his Torquemada at a flamenco Inquisition! I
began to regard this
nuevo mexicano
in a very different
light. Of course, he was physically sublime. But since I have
always had a weakness in that regard, I ignored his beauty. Then I
suddenly saw what was behind the beauty. All at once, the three of
us saw it. The dark skin that had been kissed farewell by India a
thousand years ago. The hair so black it crackled with blue as if
lighted by the moon. The lashes, the lips, the whole enchantment.
He could be my cousin if any of my family had possessed such
beauty. Here before us was the answer to a prayer we had never
dared utter.

“In the end our Inquisition came down to one
question. ‘Who are you?’

“ ‘
Soy gitano a contra costaos,’
he
answered. Gypsy on four sides.

“In spite of what our eyes were seeing, we
had to have more proof. El Pulgar took a guitar off the whitewashed
wall. A piece of crap, put there for decoration at the end of a
hard life as a
cantina guitarra
. He tuned it and stuck it in
Tomás’s hands. Tomás didn’t protest, didn’t hurl the joke of an
instrument back at El Pulgar. He strummed quietly for a few
minutes. But soon, ¡A Jalar! had fallen silent. Everyone in the
place was straining to hear the falling notes of his magical
soleá falseta
.

“ ‘
Él tiene aire,’
Chi Chi whispered
to me. But everyone in that room already knew that he had the air,
the thing that cannot be taught.

“ ‘
Tiene fuerza en el compás,’
El
Pulgar exclaimed.

“But I no longer cared whether he had the
right air or was strong in the
compás
. I ripped away the hat
hiding my face and made the only response I could at having found
my soul mate.
En voz medio
, at half voice, I sang.

“
Ay

Rompe in oscuridad de in noche

Pero en realidad es nuestra pena

Rompiéndose dentro de nosotros

“
They say each morning the dawn
breaks

But really it is our own grief

Breaking within us...

“He played and I sang and the crowd went
crazy as only a Gypsy crowd can. Men ripped the shirts from their
chests, women dug their nails into their faces until they drew
blood. The unuttered prayer was answered. El Pulgar called the
owner over and bought
una caña
for every
calé
in the
place. They would have kept us there all night if every string on
that old guitar had not broken.

“In the end, the owner had to drag us away
to a private room in the back and lock a heavy door on the chaos.
There, in that back room, we three sat in stunned silence as Tomás
spoke. I will tell you his story as he told it to us.”

Guitos paused to get into character. Drawing
himself up, he sang the briefest of
temples
, a short
Ay
, to warm
la voz
. When he next spoke, it was in
Tomás’s voice. Not an impersonation, but a channeling of his
inflections, his tone so perfect that goose bumps rippled across my
arms.

“ ‘I was raised by my great-aunt Doña
Carlota Montenegro and her husband Don Ernesto Anaya. They were
ancient when they adopted me and of a world where awkward details
are never revealed. The details of my birth were awkward. My
great-aunt was a dancer born in a cave on Sacromonte. Her mother
had been
una sensación en las cafés cantantes
in the golden
days in Sevilla. Her father was one of
los cantaores
who
beat out the very form itself on their forges in Sacromonte. Then
came the cursed days of the Civil War. My great-aunt spoke out
courageously against the fascists and was marked for death. By the
grace of God and a few well-placed admirers, she escaped. Her
family was not so lucky. All her immediate relatives, everyone
she’d known growing up, were massacred by Franco’s
guardia
civil
.

“ ‘The tragedy killed something in my
great-aunt and she forbade anyone to ever speak of it in her
presence. All I know is that my mother was a distant relative,
daughter of one of the few survivors of my great-aunt’s family. All
that is known about my father is that he was Gypsy as well. I was
taken from my mother because, as with so many of my people, there
were drugs. I was sent to America to avoid this scourge. Later, my
great-aunt searched for my mother only to learn that she had died
of an overdose shortly after I was taken from her. No trace of my
father could be found.’ ”

Guitos shook himself, and, in his own voice,
plaintive and insistent, asked, “Can you imagine the impact this
history had? You can’t. Not in America where pretending that birth
makes no difference and anyone can be anything they choose is your
national religion. But to us who know that blood is everything,
Tomás’s story was a meteor,
an asteroid
, smashing into our
planet of flamenco. The purists rejoiced. A Gypsy boy raised on the
other side of an ocean and he plays like the incarnation of
Sabicas? Here, at last, proof of what we had always said: you
cannot play
flamenco puro
, the real, the true flamenco,
without Gypsy blood.”

I nodded, astounded again at what an insular
and rarefied community Tomás had grown up in. How explosions of a
colossal magnitude within it never registered the slightest tick on
any Richter scale in the outside world.

“He was the great Gypsy hope, no?” Guitos
asked. “He would take the crown back from the
payo
who had
worn it for so long. Tomás would reclaim flamenco guitar from Paco
de Lucía. There was no question. Yes, he had
técnica
as good
as any
payo
but better, far better; he was one of us, he had
gitano
soul. He played at the biennale. Not a main stage, a
small venue, too early for the crowds to have come out. But he was
una sensación
. If Paco had been there, they would have torn
the crown from his head and put it on Tomás’s.

“And then followed the happiest time in my
life. Tomás became my accompanist. My
cante
was never
better. Each night I sang of my hopeless love and audiences, never
suspecting it was for my
tocaor
, wept. Sevilla, Madrid,
Barcelona. And then north. Ah, the farther north we went, the more
they adored us. London, Edinburgh, Copenhagen, Oslo. The more
represivo
the society, the more they worshipped us.
Santa
María de Dios! Los japoneses! Demente! Totalmente demente!
They
could teach us
gitanos
how to lose control. In Sapporo,
security had to disarm a young woman who was stabbing herself in
the chest with a knife!

“It was heaven. But I was the one who
destroyed it. An excess of love was the culprit. I made love to him
with my voice every night on a different stage and every night he
left me and made love with his body to one of the women who threw
themselves at him.” Guitos beat his chest like a penitent
sinner.

“Love finds its own way. Every city, we were
interviewed. Again and again, I heard Tomás tell his story. Each
time he was asked what he knew about his mother, his father, the
silence deepened. In the world outside of Spain, Tomás had only to
answer ‘drugs’ and no further questions would be asked. In Spain,
however, the only answer Tomás had to give was
‘la Guerra
Civil.’
In our country, a veil of secrecy so profound has been
drawn around the Civil War that where that fratricidal conflict is
concerned, there are few good questions and no good answers. So, we
learn from birth simply not to ask.

“But I asked. I asked because
gitanos
, who won’t say anything to a
payo
except a
lie and rarely even tell one another the truth, will tell me the
truth. I asked because the old-timers think I am the great Antonio
Mairena come back to earth and will talk to me of matters they
wouldn’t discuss with their confessors. I asked because I wanted to
give Tomás my heart and he would never take it. All he might ever
accept from me was knowledge. I will tell you how this tragedy
befell me.