"The Flamenco Academy" (46 page)

“Little of this, little of that. Family
business, you know. The kind of business they have up north.” He
tipped his chin up, toward a north where family business was
conducted that anyone who was
enterao
wouldn’t be stupid
enough to ask about. “He’s not really my cousin,” he added, turning
away to indicate that the subject was closed. At least to a white
girl who wouldn’t understand the intricate gradations of northern
New Mexican
primos
.

The sun isolated everything on the fields
below in shimmering radiance: a cemetery, white crosses stippled
into a barren field; a lot holding acres of repossessed cars inside
high curls of concertina wire; a factory that made bandages;
another that manufactured wooden pallets; a tow truck impaled on a
thirty-foot pole; the dusty filigree of dirt bike trails looping
over the knobby earth that sprouted little aside from rabbitbrush,
Russian thistles, and old tires. Monolithic pylons marched across
the landscape unspooling loops of silver power line. The light
haloed Tomás sitting behind the wheel of a truck like a normal
human being. I kept looking away, then back again, just for the
shock of seeing him beside me.

Erotomania
, I screamed in my mind at
the therapist, Leslie. Here he is. He’s chosen me. But Leslie
slipped away. It was Didi I wanted to tell, the only person on
earth who knew that I had climbed Mount Everest, won seven Olympic
gold medals, and been awarded a Nobel Prize. No one else knew what
I’d done to win, who I’d had to become.

We turned on Rio Bravo.
“Vive Como Un
Rey.”
Tomás read the message on a billboard urging us to live
like a king, drink Budweiser.

He scraped open the ashtray, pulled out a
partially smoked joint, lit it, and, holding it out to me, joked,
“Vive Coma Una Reina.”

I laughed. Yes, I
would
, I would live
like a queen.

We crossed the Rio Grande. It flowed beneath
us, a broad swath of dull, aluminum-colored water bordered by
cottonwoods grown to primeval size. On Rio Bravo, we turned off and
made our way through a tangle of ever-smaller streets, lanes, and
paths running along the river. We finished the joint and the day
turned much jollier.

“Did you see that?” I asked, pointing to a
row of a dozen identical navy blue T-shirts flapping on a line.
They suddenly held a comic significance only Tomás and I understood
and we laughed until Tomás ran off the dirt road. That made us
laugh even more. As did a piñata in the shape of a pirate hanging
forlornly from a big elm. As did a miniature horse nibbling a flake
of alfalfa. The midget horse made me laugh until I was afraid I’d
wet my pants. We stopped laughing long enough for me to point to an
artfully spray-painted graffito swirling in hectic gang-style
script across the side of a metal storage shed that carefully
instructed all viewers, FUCK YUO.

The thought of some homeboy misspelling his
rage against the machine then became the funniest thing either of
us had ever seen. As we reached the house where Tomás was staying,
he was pounding my back and I was trying to catch my breath. We
stopped outside a high adobe wall and he punched a code in. A
wrought-iron gate swung open.

On the other side was a compound with a
massive adobe hacienda tucked into the shadows cast by several
prodigious cottonwoods. The estate’s walled isolation made me
recall Tomás referring to the “family business,” and the words
drug lord’s palace
appeared like a crawl beneath the unkempt
opulence of the property. That suspicion was confirmed when we went
inside. The house seemed to have been decorated by a
thirteen-year-old boy with an unlimited line of credit: plasma TV,
round bed with black satin sheets, monster sound system. Walk-in
closets were filled with every article of clothing that FUBU and
Sean John had ever manufactured.

“Can you believe this shit?” Tomás asked,
laughing. Next to him a pump kicked on, powering a six-foot-high
acrylic sculpture that sent tendrils of orange and magenta oil
droplets shimmying up a wavy panel where lights and bubbles
vibrated. “
Mis primos
from up north are pretty basic
guys.”

I knew he was talking about the village in
northern New Mexico that Guitos had told me was Tomás’s one true
home. I wanted to ask about it, about his
primos
and their
“family business,” but I didn’t. I was an alien trying to slip
through customs with forged papers, trying to enter a country where
I did not belong. I was not going to call attention to my outsider
status by asking questions. Not about northern New Mexico, not
about flamenco, not about
los primos
, not about
anything.

Still, answers to my unasked questions were
in the simple acts Tomás performed. When he built a fire, he had
the practiced expertise of someone who has risen on many cold
mountain mornings in places where warmth came from wood. Piñon
wood. The fragrance of piñon filled the house, warming it even more
than the fire.

“
Una copita?”
he asked me, tipping
his thumb and pinkie up. He pulled green bottles of Dos Equis lager
for us out of the refrigerator. “You like posole?”

“With red chile?”

“
Claro.
I’m going to make the best
posole for you that you’ve ever tasted.
Mi tío
Ernesto
taught me how.” He’d already soaked the dried hominy and put the
fat kernels of corn on to boil in a cast-iron pot, adding garlic,
Mexican oregano, onion, green chiles; then he browned a cut of beef
I didn’t recognize.

“You don’t use pork shoulder?” I asked,
showing off what I’d learned from Alejandro, who had told me that
pork shoulder was essential for good posole.

“A lot of people do. I asked
Tío
Ernesto once why he didn’t. He didn’t have a reason, just that they
always used beef in his village and it was always good. So why
change?” Tomás asked, showing me how to pour boiling water to
soften dried red chiles, then scrape pulp from the leathery skins
to make red chile.

The history of New Mexico, of Spaniards in
the New World, went into the stew of dried hominy, chiles, and
meat. Certainly, Tomás’s history was there as he performed each
step of the preparation with the devotion of an acolyte. Still, as
he chopped an onion, I realized that this was the first human
moment I’d had with him, the first moment with Tomás that wasn’t
part of a fairy tale. That he was a real human and that we were in
the same room, breathing the same air.

While the posole simmered, Tomás began my
true flamenco education. In my years at the Flamenco Academy, I’d
studied a complicated equation, but as Tomás played, he showed me
that I had only solved half of the problem. The equation had to be
balanced with a guitarist and a singer before it could be proved. I
thought I knew how to work with a guitarist. I didn’t. I’d learned
a basic vocabulary at the academy. That evening, Tomás began
teaching me how to combine the simple words and phrases I knew into
eloquent passages that would express what he wanted expressed about
his playing. I had had my last
yo soy
moment during the
audition. Tomás was not just the star, the featured performer; he
was the entire reason for my being onstage. I was his interpreter.
My job was to translate from the ear to the eye.

It was midnight before he put his guitar
down and we fell upon the posole, devouring it with thick tortillas
dripping with butter, washing it all down with Dos Equis lager.
Tiny cups of the espresso Tomás brewed followed, so that we could
stay up even later. It was near dawn before we went to bed and much
later before we went to sleep.

That period before the first tour was a
space out of time. Our hours in the house by the river were
measured out in piñon fires. He played and I danced. I danced
harder than I ever had before. As harsh as the great-aunt had been,
the great-nephew was twice as tough. My life took shape around the
spaces I occupied while dancing or making love with Tomás. Within
both those areas, I found equal parts ecstasy and terror. These
elements created a compound as unstable as nitroglycerin. I hardly
dared breathe, fearing it would blow up, that he would choose
someone else. I had been picked, but I never stopped
auditioning.

Then a fax machine spit out a cloud of
itineraries that floated onto the floor. Tomás picked up the sheets
of paper from the promoter and began packing for the tour that
would establish him in the United States. We left the house on the
river where I had learned to translate into motion every note Tomás
plucked. Walking toward the airport, dragging bags behind us like
obedient dogs on leashes, Tomás and I fell out of step. Going on
the road required him to put on psychic armor and as he strode
ahead of me, it locked into place. We passed beneath the caped
warrior reaching for the eagle and, for a moment, I wished Didi had
been there to say good-bye.

Our first stop was Tulsa, Oklahoma. We
played a medium-size hall at the university. That night, I
understood what Tomás had trained me for. His was the name that
caused people to open their wallets and pull out forty, fifty, a
hundred dollars for a ticket. His was the face on the poster. The
pressure was on him. My job was simply to provide a little
movement, a change of pace. I was his foil. My paleness accentuated
Tomás’s dark ethnicity. My understated dancing never stole the
spotlight from his passionate playing. My white-bread American
background never upstaged his pedigree as the Gypsy ward of a
flamenco legend,
gitano a cuatro costaos
. The last year my
family had lived in Houdek, Daddy brought home a novelty Christmas
gift, a plastic flower in a pot, wired with fiber optics that would
light up to music, flashing different colors for every tune that
was played. I was that flower in a pot. That was the bargain I’d
made, and I did everything in my power to live up to it.

For one month we did nothing but perform,
party, make love, and travel to the next gig, where it all started
again. In spite of being in a different city almost every day, a
surprising sameness overtook our lives. In each new venue, we’d be
picked up at the airport by someone I came to think of as the
Guitar Nerd. The Guitar Nerd, holding up Tomás’s CD, met us as we
stepped off the plane. He was frequently a college professor, often
accompanied by his prize student.

All the Guitar Nerds were driven to prove
themselves to Tomás. After a few warm-up compliments in which
they’d proclaim Tomás to be the next Paco de Lucía or, if they were
really reaching, far better than Paco, they’d work in references to
their own flamenco backgrounds. The older ones would mention their
time in “Moron” with “Diego.” The younger ones would ask nerdophile
questions about nail filing: “Always in the same direction!” Or the
merits of Hannanbach bass strings mixed with La Bella trebles over,
say, just going with Luthier Concert Silvers on all six. To really
prove themselves as initiates in the flamenco world, they would
casually pass Tomás a joint.

After the performance, there would be a
reception given by the head of the music department or the guitar
society or whatever group had sponsored our visit. We’d sip Spanish
red and eat olives and almonds; sometimes the faculty wife would
attempt gazpacho or get her countries mixed up entirely and do
taquitos.

Then the magic word,
juerga
, would
pass through the group. If there were enough initiates, the real
party would start right there. If not, the
aficionados
would
slip away to adjourn at a bar or someone’s ratty apartment. There
the focus would be on the true
juerga’s
nearly sacramental
use of controlled substances. In short, everyone would get utterly
baked. That was when I would have to be my most vigilant, for the
flamenco minxes truly swarmed at
juergas
. Fortunately, I’d
studied with the master and knew every trick in the groupie
playbook.

We’d all take a brief break from the party
for that evening’s performance, where Tomás would astonish the
locals by playing with both passion and precision no matter how
wasted he’d been only moments before stepping onstage. I’d provide
a bit of color and motion. Then, the instant we took our last bows,
we would be swept back into the bacchanal we’d just left. The party
would typically go on all night and not end until whoever risked
being mocked as anal-retentive for wearing a watch would yell out
that our flight was leaving in an hour. Then there would be a mad
scramble to the airport and, with many
abrazos
and
besos
, we’d be poured onto the plane where Tomás would
promptly pass out.

In each city there would be an interview. It
might be on the local NPR station, or the arts editor from the
local paper would meet us in a coffee shop. The interviewer would
have already read all the clips about Tomás, the stories that
always mentioned the phrase
gitano per cuatro costaos
to
explain that his birth mother and father back in Spain were both
pure Gypsy. He would already know that Doña Carlota, a famous
flamenco dancer and herself
gitana par cuatro costaos,
had
been asked by the doomed addict mother, her great-niece back in
Spain, to adopt the child because the family knew he would be
brought up in the old Gypsy way.

The interviewers asked Tomás for refinements
on the theme of authenticity. Did he feel he would be able to play
flamenco puro
the way he did if he hadn’t been brought up in
the tradition? If he didn’t have Gypsy blood in his veins? They
asked how his great-aunt was doing. Was she still living in Santa
Fe? Did he see her often? After each successive interview, Tomás
grew quieter and more distant. I knew why. I knew his secret, but I
had already used it, used it to become an ally in his deception.
Bit by bit, though, rather than being an ally, I became the emblem
of his deception, a pretender slipping into camp under the
protection of a powerful insider who was herself a fraud. His
detachment grew until I came to live for the moments when I was
onstage with him, dancing, being the flower in the pot that only
his guitar could bring to life. Only then was he really with
me.