"The Flamenco Academy" (44 page)

Didi stood panting, her sweat and hard
breathing the only part of the performance that was real. Everyone
except Alma and Tomás, however, leaped to their feet applauding
wildly. Alma looked at me and shook her head, her expression a
combination of disdain for the praise being heaped on Didi and
disappointment with me.

Didi reached out and hauled me into the
winner’s circle. “Don’t forget Rae. This is really her show.” Her
calculated graciousness was as transparent as an opera diva
thanking her dresser and just as easily dismissed as the group
continued their hosannas. Contained within their congratulations
was a foregone conclusion: Tomás would select Didi. She had saved
us, saved me, saved the academy; that was what was on everybody’s
face. I had frozen and, in the space of one
compás
, I’d lost
what I wanted most.

As Tomás laid his guitar down on the chair
and came toward us, I saw the years, decades, stretch ahead of me.
I saw that they would be spent living and reliving the moment when
I had trembled on the shore, when I had not dived in and Didi had.
Years that would stretch into decades when I’d struggle to find a
way to believe that my blood sister had not betrayed me. If Tomás
carried away the slightest impression of me, it would be as one of
the worst dancers he’d ever played for. I saw that those years
would commence the second he reached our circle and told Didi that,
of course, she had been selected, she was the one. She would be his
partner.

His great-aunt’s warning came back to me:
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.

The question I couldn’t ask Doña Carlota
came back:
How does a small tree kill a big tree?

Before Tomás could reach Didi’s charmed
circle, I stepped out of it and stopped him. I felt as if I were at
the top of a roller coaster with no memory of how I’d gotten
there.

“I would like to dance.” My voice was a
croak.

“You just did.”

“Not really. Not... I’d like another
chance.”

Tomás glanced over my shoulder at the group
waiting for him in the winner’s circle, then back at me.

“Please,” I whispered. “I know you’re not
going to pick me, but I’d like another chance. I’m really not a bad
dancer.”

He leaned in close to me, his lips brushing
the hair around my ear, and whispered in a kind voice, “I don’t
think you’re a bad dancer. But, maybe, a good dancer who is having
a bad day.”

“All I want is the chance to redeem myself.
Nothing more.”

He nodded and, walking back to the chair,
asked over his shoulder, “What do you want to dance?”

By this time, Didi and the others had turned
and were staring at us so that they all heard when a voice that was
not my voice, answered,
“Por siguiriyas.”

“Did she ask for a
siguiriyas
?”
someone behind me whispered unbelieving.

I barely believed myself that I’d requested
the darkest, the deepest, the most
jondo
of all the
palos
,
siguiriyas
, the song of lamentation, the song
of mourning. It was as if a grade school piano student had
announced her intention of playing Rachmaninoff. It was
presumptuous and absurd, yet in that moment of losing a dream I’d
named to no one except the best friend who’d just stolen it from
me, the song of death was the right one to ask for.

Tomás shook his head. “No.
Siguiriyas
is to be sung, not danced.
Siguiriyas
is not for this.” He
waved at the metal folding chairs, the faces, avid, ready to judge.
“
Siguiriyas
is not for today. Not for you.” He reached for
his case.

I started clapping,
palmas secas
,
claps that rang out like rifle shots. One, two,
three
! Four,
five,
six
! Seven,
eight
! Nine,
ten
! Eleven,
twelve
! I kept on, slamming my palms together on the eight
where the
siguiriyas
count began. The rapping was a call, a
command. Coded within it was not only the unique rhythm of the
style I was demanding, but the message that I knew the password.
That I had a right to ask for it. Tomás stopped closing the latches
on his guitar case.

I clapped even louder, chanting out the
rhythm, starting on the eight, “
bomp
, bom,
bomp
, bom,
bomp
, bom, bom,
bomp
, bom bom
bomp
.” I hit a
counterrhythm with my foot and clucked my tongue loud as my
nail-studded heel hit the wooden floor. I used every syllable of
the secret language I’d spent all those years learning and I asked
for this, for one last dance before I slid forever from Tomás
Montenegro’s awareness.

Too late, years too late, I fought to reach
the sun.

Tomás turned and stared at me for a long
moment before he heaved a sigh of resignation, pulled his guitar
out of its case, nestled it on his lap, then slowly raised his
hands and began clapping the beat back to me. He was annoyed. I
didn’t care. If I was going to disappear forever from his thoughts,
at least I would mark my passing with a wrinkle or two of
irritation.

Tomás curled his hands and body around his
guitar and strummed. This time his playing was dry, unadorned. He
wasn’t trying, I knew that. His body was angled away, as close as
he could get to turning his back on me. In a world where
communication had to be immediate, electric, this was the ultimate
insult; he was shutting off the current. He’d already dismissed me.
It didn’t matter. Dismissal fit this
palo
, this moment.
Where his
bulerías
had been an ocean, the parched desolation
of
siguiriyas
required a desert. He played a
falseta
of Diego del Gastor, the master of old-school flamencos from
el
arte’s
ancient heart in Jerez de la Frontera.

I stood, keeping the rhythm with a soft,
muffled
palmas sordas
. Then I walked toward him.

He glanced up, merely a perfunctory check
asking if the tempo, the style, were right. The barest of
professional courtesies.
Nada más.
I nodded. He settled
himself. I breathed in, breathed out. Tomás started the
entrada
, playing the six-beat
compás
of the
siguiriyas
. Where other guitarists would have rushed in to
ornament the silence with flourishes, tremolos,
picado
,
where every note would have been frilled and filigreed, Tomás
allowed the time I needed to descend to flamenco’s most profound
depth.

My hands twined in languid
floreos
that fanned the fingers out and around the pivot of my wrist. I
lifted my arms as slowly as mist rising off a dark lake, and just
that, just raising my arms above my head, filled one, two, three
compases
.

Tomás’s elemental playing was a broad and
infinite avenue to any destination I chose. On the last note of the
entrada
, I stepped forward, putting my foot down on the
boulevard of his
toque
. What lay before me was not the
typical dancer’s challenge. This could not be a technical exercise.
In choosing to dance
por siguiriyas
, I had chosen flamenco’s
essential challenge:
Dame la verdad.
Give me the truth, say
something true. The one true thing I had to say at that instant was
good-bye. The time that had started one night when the moon
vanished was about to end and my fate now was to bid it farewell.
My every movement was heavy with that inevitability in a way that
made me understand at last what it was to dance
con peso
,
with weight. Every
compás
, every
falseta
, every note
I’d danced while trying to create a musical bridge to Tomás crushed
down on me.

I did a twelve-count
llamada
, my
loaded feet pounding the earth, pouring out the rhythms I would
never need again. I held nothing back. I threw out every
golpe-tacón-punta
combination I’d learned. I tossed them
away in double, triple time. When I was done, I had nothing to
lose. All I had was the solitary promise flamenco ever makes, the
promise of eternity if you can create one moment ravishing
enough.

I was infinitely lighter walking through my
paseo
. Flamenco had been a yoke I’d harnessed myself to. The
instant I threw it off, my shoulders rose—“Lift! Lift! Lift!” My
chest expanded, growing thick and deep and, seizing control, I
started the
desplante
precisely on the eight count.

For the first time, Tomás looked up, ready
to seriously follow, ready to seriously play. He sat up, read the
declaration I was choreographing before him, composed his response
and struck a B-flat chord that broke every heart in the room
because no B-flat would ever be played with such cruel beauty
again. In it was all anyone needed to know about flamenco. The
chord was played in honor of that exact instant, an instant that he
and I had created that was gone before it could be noticed.

Tomás stared straight into my eyes. He
studied every curl of each finger I fanned upward, read what I
wrote in those twining arabesques and translated them into
languages I understood, though I’d never heard them before. He was
a mirror that reflected my betrayal, anger, grief. Every pluck of
the string was a pact made with the eternity of now, the only place
where flamenco truly exists. He was an amplifier that let me hear
for the first time what my own heart sounded like. There was no
possibility of lying, of hiding: I hated Didi and I danced that.
She had betrayed me and I danced that. I danced my stubborn
stupidity in wanting Tomás and my grief that I would never have
him. I was dancing it before I saw the loneliness it had all sprung
from.

Tomás stroked an A minor that made the
angels weep. The past three and a half years vanished, taking with
them every longing I’d ever had. Each note Tomás played was only
for this second, an instant that was gone as soon as he’d thought
of it. He was a lens that magnified, clarified.

An odd bubble of exhilaration rose within me
like the moment when my father had taken his hand away and I’d
ridden a bike for the first time. Tomás played that as well, the
fear, a clutch of panic, the certainty that I was going to die the
second my father took his hand away. Then soaring. I danced the
wobbling, tipsy giddiness of life and the soaring that is only
possible because we’re all precisely one inch of rubber away from
falling forever.

My body danced the realization before it hit
my brain:
This is what flamenco is, knowing you’re alone, you’re
going to die, and dancing anyway.

I touched my forehead, the realization
overtaking me so powerfully that I fell out of
compás
. I
glanced at Tomás, who responded instantaneously to that split
second of vulnerability, playing those emotions with a tenderness
that undid me even further. Seeing that I was lost, he took control
and switched to A minor to signal a
silencio
, the section
where the guitarist claimed center stage while the singer and
dancer rested. Gratitude for his kindness, for rescuing me, poured
out to him in the sweep of my arms.

He created an asylum for me by laying back
on the driving rhythm and filling the
silencio
with melody.
While I collected myself, I executed some simple marking steps
until I was ready to call for the next sequence. He decanted
strength into me with each
falseta
he strummed.

It saddened me to realize that I was leaving
flamenco just when I finally understood it. I strode forward,
decisively calling for the
escobilla
. If I’d thought about
any of this in advance, I’d never have considered introducing an
escobilla
with its machine-gun footwork into the deepest,
most
jondo
, of all the forms. But I hadn’t thought, hadn’t
planned. I was stepping into each new second and letting whatever
instant I found myself in dictate how it was to be expressed. This
second demanded an
escobilla
.

Tomás switched effortlessly out of the
melody and transformed his guitar back into a percussion
instrument. His hand blurred on the strings, pouring out a flood of
precise rhythm metered by rousing thumps of
golpe
. He was
the best accompanist I’d ever heard, live or recorded. His beat was
so strong, with accents as clear as stepping stones, a dancer would
have to be deaf not to be able to follow its path.

I moved aside and let my feet follow the
rhythm. Doña Carlota had always told us to aim for a spot one
quarter inch below the floor. I aimed for hell and woke up every
sleeping demon at its dark center. They swarmed up into my heels
and I pounded out my fury and rage at Didi’s betrayal. Maybe it
wasn’t justified. Maybe she’d genuinely been trying to help me.
Maybe she’d had my back. I didn’t care. I was pissed off and danced
that in my farewell dance.

I grimaced, not caring what my face did as
long as my feet could do what they had to. As I hammered out my
message of anger and wounded pride, I understood the arrogance in
flamenco. It rose up in me, seeming to pass through every century
of exile and ostracism endured by the outcast people who’d created
it. I stood directly in front of Tomás and held my swaying skirt up
so he could see my beautiful legs, my astonishing footwork. I
wanted him to get a good look at everything he was passing up. The
fool.

I was in command again and ordered yet
another
escobilla
. I increased the tempo, not believing
myself how fast my heels were striking. Tomás leaned forward,
strumming faster to give me the propulsion I needed. Yet, as my
feet slammed harder and faster, time slowed and I felt myself
escaping the gravity of everything I’d ever known. Fog, mists,
clouds fell away until I was out of any atmosphere I’d previously
breathed.