"The Flamenco Academy" (40 page)

“We were in Frankfurt, where I have a
tremendous following. The tour was coming to an end and I was
frantic to find a way to keep Tomás in my life. I had almost
succeeded in talking him into coming home with me to Málaga to
record a new album when Tomás received word from New Mexico that
Ernesto Anaya, the man who had raised him as a son, was gravely
ill. Tomás talked all the time about Ernesto. Love flowed with
every word when he told me about the small village in the north of
the state where Ernesto had been born, where Tomás had spent the
only happy days of his childhood. On the other hand, Tomás never
spoke about his great-aunt. Never. So complete was his silence that
it spoke volumes about a pain he would not approach. He broke that
silence when his great-aunt, worried most about disturbing the
tour, waited until the last possible moment to tell him how sick
his great-uncle was. Tomás cursed his great-aunt then for that and
for all the secrets she had kept from him.

“He packed to leave immediately and I,
desperate for any way to bind him to me, made a promise. I promised
to discover the names of his mother and father. I knew the heads of
every Gypsy dynasty who had lived or had relatives who had lived on
Sacromonte during the time his great-aunt had grown up there. One
of them would know. I promised Tomás that, while he was back in New
Mexico, I would go to Granada and would find an answer. Tomás was
ecstatic. We were never closer. At Frankfurt Airport, in spite of
the shadow that Ernesto’s poor health cast over Tomás, joy at the
prospect of learning who his parents were haloed him as we said our
good-byes.

“I rushed to Granada, but not the Granada of
Lorca, not the Granada Fernando and Isabel took back from the
Moors. No, I did not visit the Granada of hidden patios where
fountains splash and bougainvillea twines. I went to my friends on
Sacromonte and was sent to a retirement home in an immigrant
neighborhood on the far edge of Granada. The neighborhood was
filled with Tunisians and Algerians in cheap polyester sweaters,
Basques who’d come in the sixties and never left, Latin Americans
who spent all their money calling home. The retirement home sitting
between two highways, around the corner from a brake-manufacturing
plant, could have been anywhere. A concrete building with no more
charm than a warehouse, it smelled of piss and boiled potatoes. The
relatives who’d sent me to that place where they’d packed away
their
viejos
had called ahead. But, even if they hadn’t been
warned, the old-timers would have been ready for me. They had read
the articles about this newcomer, this
fenómeno de Nuevo
Mexico
who claimed Gypsy blood. They’d seen the photograph of
the phenomenon’s great-aunt. It was the one Tomás carried with him
only because it was one of the few he had of Don Ernesto, who stood
beside his great-aunt, grinning beneath a huge mustache like
Zapata. In the photo that the old-timers shoved into my face and
stabbed at with tobacco-stained fingers, Doña Carlota is pale as
steam. In the articles Tomás explained that his great-aunt’s
mother, Delicata, was just as light-skinned.
Los viejos
talked. Oh, they talked. And I wished I’d never asked.

“I went home, had a tall drink and a long
bath, but couldn’t wash away their smells, their sadness, or my
deep regret that I had ever met them. When Tomás called that night,
I put on a bright voice and said, ‘
Lástima
. Too bad. They
wouldn’t talk. I learned nothing. Gypsies, you know how they
are.’

“I will never forget what he answered.
‘Guitos, for a lifetime you have told the truth in song. You have
no training telling lies and you do it extraordinarily badly. All
that we have, you and I, all that we will ever have, is honesty.
Dame la verdad
.’

“Give me the truth. That is what we always
told each other before we went onstage. That was our pledge that we
would never sing or play a note that was false. One note of
falseness and the only link I had to
mi corazón
would be
destroyed.

“ ‘
Dame la verdad,’
he repeated and I
told him what the toothless old men had told me: ‘Your great-aunt
never lived in Sacromonte. Yes, there was
una bailaora
named
Delicata married to El Chino,
un herrero
, but she was dark,
dark as a Moor.
Muy morena.
Dark, dark, dark. She had
several daughters. The oldest was a girl named Rosa. All of Rosa’s
children were also dark, dark as the darkest Gypsy.’

“Tomás didn’t speak for a long time. I
listened to the galaxies of space between us crackle and hum. Then,
‘Guitos, I’m going to disappear for a while. Figure this out. I’ll
call you when I can.’ He thanked me and hung up before I could say
another word.”

I tried to grasp the heresy Guitos had just
spoken. “Doña Carlota never lived on Sacromonte?” Even me, the
payo
, even I was having trouble turning loose of the one
tiny claim to legitimacy in the flamenco world that Doña Carlota
had given me: I had been taught by
una gitana por cuatro
costaos
. I couldn’t imagine the implications for Tomás. If what
Guitos was saying was true, Tomás would have almost as little right
to belong to flamenco’s inner circle as I. But it couldn’t be true.
“How could Doña Carlota have fooled everyone for so long?”

Guitos clucked his tongue sympathetically.
“Oh,
pobrecita
, if every
flamenco
who claimed
gitano
blood they didn’t have were banished from
el
arte
, you wouldn’t hear a castanet clack or a
clave
tap
from one Semana Santa to the next. They all claim to have a Gypsy
grandmother tucked away somewhere. No, Doña Carlota knew she would
never be discovered for many reasons.” Guitos ticked them off: “She
was on the other side of an ocean. Still, even now, we
gitanos
are not a people interested in keeping the record
straight. We don’t report things to ‘the authorities.’ We keep to
ourselves. Besides, most of the ones who would have said anything
are dead, no? Nearly a million people died in the Spanish Civil
War. Who, aside from the handful of old-timers I spoke to, could
say that the ancestors she claimed had not been among those who
were killed? Doña Carlota could have claimed she was queen of the
Gypsies and no one in Spain would have cared. Who was she? Some
broken-down dance teacher on the wrong side of the water. No one
cared about her, a nobody. But”—Guitos poked up one, cautionary
finger—“but Tomás, Tomás was another story entirely. We Gypsies are
only too happy to share failure, but success? Success like that
Tomás was on the verge of? That,
that
, we will fight
over.”

Guitos spread his palms and gave a desolate
shrug. “When I told him that his great-aunt had never lived on
Sacromonte, he wasn’t surprised. He’d suspected for a long time
that she was a fraud. But if you are a fish, how do you question
water? Not only was her story all he’d ever known of his own, but
it was the basis for his own place on the earth. Still, he had
suspected. That night there was a lunar eclipse. So after I told
him, after I destroyed his world, I watched the moon disappear and
hoped it had vanished wherever
mi angelito
was so we might
be together in that one, last thing.”

“And that was the night...”

“He met you.”

“That’s why he’d said it was the worst night
of his life.”

Guitos sagged. “Me, I brought that sadness
to him. After that, he was changed. He returned a few times but
refused to play in front of any audience that might be
enterao
. No more insiders. He would play with me on tours to
Japan, Finland, Australia. Anywhere but Spain or North America. If
he began to receive too much attention, too much acclaim, he would
disappear. Again and again he returned to the place he considered
home, to the little village in northern New Mexico where he’d spent
the only happy times of his childhood with his beloved Tío
Ernesto.”

“What village is that?”

“He never told me.”

My cell phone rang. I knew it was Alma and
quickly turned it off. But the spell had been broken.

Guitos turned from me. “I’ve said too much.”
A second later, his phone rang. He glanced at the name, swore,
“Caray!”
and answered. I could hear Alma cursing Guitos even
before he lifted the phone to his ear. My name was mentioned
several times as well. We were walking out the door and heading for
Popejoy Hall before she’d finished excoriating both of us.

Guitos’s performance that night was a master
class on the meaning of the elusive term
duende
. The spirit
moved through him, but every one of us in the hall shivered.
Black sounds
—that’s how Lorca, quoting the great singer
Manuel Torre, defined
duende
. “Whatever has black sounds has
duende
.” From the moment he stepped onstage, Guitos filled
the hall with black sounds.

His voice was a tortured rumble that
contained the essence of Andalusia and embodied flamenco’s heritage
from the Moors’ mosques, the Jews’ synagogues, through every
country the Gypsies wandered across, right back to the motherland
in India. Guitos drew in a deep breath, diving far into himself,
then exploded to the surface with his eyes and fists clenched,
singing in a full-throated wail. He sang to the stars that had
betrayed his dreams and turned his love to dust. Sweat ran down his
dark face, pouring into the muffler tied around his neck as he
reached even further into himself for notes so laden with despair
that not a single person in the hall needed a translator.

As Guitos sat in the blazing light and wept
for the love the earth eating the moon had stolen from him, I
envied him. I envied that he was a part of Tomás’s world, a true
flamenco. I envied every second they’d spent together. Then he
opened his fists, his eyes, he found me gazing up at him from the
first row, and sang every second of my one night with Tomás. He
sang the heavens opening as we swung together into the stars. Then,
he sang with such clairvoyant precision the moment when the stars
went dark and Tomás left me, a bubble of sorrow rose in my chest.
If I were truly
una flamenca
, if I truly belonged in Tomás’s
world, I would have wept openly.

As I knew he would be, Guitos was swept away
after the performance, and I didn’t see him again until the end of
the festival when I drove him to the airport. This time, the van
was filled with other performers. Though I ached for him to give me
a few more crumbs of information, Guitos spent the entire ride
cajoling every visiting Spaniard into carrying some of his loot
back for him so that he wouldn’t have to pay duty on the saddles he
intended to sell to Gypsy horse-trader friends.

I hoped to snatch a moment alone with
Guitos, but the chattering crowd of muscled dancers and rumpled
guitarists fluttered about him like egrets circling a bull. By the
time they had all been herded into the airport and were heading
toward the International Departures terminal, I had given up. We
were within sight of the statue of the caped Indian warrior when
Guitos broke from the group and hurried back to me. His muffler was
wrapped tightly around his neck and he was whispering again. His
Spanish was hushed and rapid. I leaned close and he asked, “You
will always keep his secret, no?”

“
Sí. Siempre.”

“Guitos!” A thin male dancer waved
frantically for the singer to hurry.

“
Bueno
, I have to leave. One last
question: If I send him back to you, will you be ready?”

I nodded without knowing what I was agreeing
to. It didn’t matter. Guitos knew I would have agreed to
anything.

“Then God have mercy on us both.” He wrapped
me in
un abrazo fuerte
, then left, rushing past the warrior
forever reaching out to catch an eagle.

Didi barely came home for most of the summer
before our senior year. Mrs. Steinberg had abruptly stopped
drinking and, through her Internet connections and extended family
back in Manila, had found a new life. She never talked to me about
it directly, so I had to gather clues from peeking at her computer
screen and eavesdropping on phone conversations. From what I could
piece together, she had become an onsite screener of potential
husbands for the daughters of friends and relatives back in the
Philippines. This involved lots of high-pitched, hectic
conversations in which vital information was exchanged; then
Catwoman would leave for days at a time. When she returned, more
conversations followed that centered on descriptions of cars,
houses, quality of lawn care, overall impressions of neighborhoods.
If that was all satisfactory, face-to-face interviews with the
prospective suitor would be arranged. It seemed that Mrs. Steinberg
was the perfect person to investigate exactly how an unknown
American man might treat a mail-order bride.

With both Didi and Catwoman gone most of the
time, the Lair revealed itself for what it was: a converted garage
furnished by two high school girls. Being there made me lonely. I
felt as if I were living in a monument to our friendship, a
friendship that existed mostly now in memory. It was time to move
on. I found a garage apartment on the alley behind the Frontier
Restaurant. It was cramped and drafty, but it was across the street
from the university, and I could walk to the academy in five
minutes.

Everything shifted once I left. Maybe it was
leaving the hideout where I’d holed up after Daddy died and my
mother decamped. Maybe it was just not having Didi around. With
Didi, I was the solid one, the one with her feet on the ground. It
was like standing next to a flaming red billboard. I could be
wearing chartreuse and still look fairly ordinary. Without the
three-ring circus of flaming red distractions that Didi always
provided, the chartreuse began to stand out. I started seeing a
therapist at the Student Health Center.