"The Flamenco Academy" (49 page)

The cottonwoods in Santa Fe, a few weeks
behind their sisters to the south, had piled drifts of fluff at the
base of the coyote fence made of saplings lashed together that
ringed the Anaya compound. The gate was unlocked. A Black Forest of
untended spruce and pines surrounded the house, casting it into
deep shadows rare in the sun-blasted city. Old snow surviving in
the shade glittered dully. The vintage Buick used to drive Doña
Carlota to class was parked beside the house. Where the houses
nearby turned faces brightened with ristras of scarlet chiles and
turquoise blue lintels to passersby, Doña Carlota’s house was
devoid of such public Land of Enchantment adornments. Unadorned,
unkempt even, it turned in on itself, showing a blank facade to the
outside world.

The front door was massive, made of dark
wood and held together with black studs. I knocked and had ample
time to study the figure of Saint James, patron saint of Spain,
lance in hand atop a rearing stallion, guarding the house from his
place tucked inside a
nicho
in the thick adobe wall. I was
leaning in close to read what was painted on the tile behind the
saint: SANTIAGO SEA CON NOSOTROS, Saint James be with us, when the
door opened.

I recognized the elderly family retainer who
had driven Doña Carlota. He found me examining the saint. He
smiled, displaying a full set of very white teeth. In spite of the
threadbare work khakis held up by suspenders and an old olive
sweater frayed at the cuffs, the old man seemed as distinguished as
he had when I’d caught a glimpse of him dressed in a suit and tie.
He gave the saint a fond caress, then stuck his hand out to me and
introduced himself. “Teófilo.” His hand was warm, the palm rough
with calluses.
“Pásele, pásele.”
He waved me into the
house.

I followed him down a dark hallway into a
dark living room and took a seat on a mahogany chair big as throne.
“I’ll tell La Doña you’re here.” He disappeared into the back of
the house. Masses of velvet red roses in various stages of decay
were bunched in vases throughout the room. Their cloying aroma
combined with the scent of piñon from decades of fires to create a
fragrance that defined flamenco in New Mexico.
Retablos,
máscaras, bultos, santos,
and every other conceivable piece of
art that could have been lifted from a church in northern New
Mexico gave the room the feel of a museum. Then I noticed the
contents of the shelves lining the large room on three sides and
saw that the true focus of enshrinement was Tomás.

Every moment of his young life in flamenco
was documented. Handsome professional photos of him lined the
shelves. The photos were all framed, all in black and white, and in
every single one of them, he held a guitar. There was not one photo
of a grin with front teeth missing, not one in a Cub Scout uniform.
No pictures of friends, classmates, teachers. No First Communion.
No mortarboard. There weren’t even any photos of Doña Carlota or
her husband, Ernesto, with Tomás. The only other thing with him in
any of the photos was a guitar. From a solemn boy with a guitar, he
grew, photo by photo, into a solemn young man with a guitar. The
last one in the chronology was a photo that depicted Tomás in his
mid-twenties, the age when I met him, the age when he had walked
out of Doña Carlota’s life.

“She’s not feeling up to coming out.” I
turned around. Teófilo was gesturing toward the back of the house.
“You mind going back?” His voice was pleasant. I followed him down
the dark hallway to a door at the end. He opened it and stepped
aside as I entered. Doña Carlota’s bedroom was something out of a
Gustav Klimt painting, with dozens of photos in glittering gilt
frames, acres of ornate fabric covering every inch, and her, pale,
emaciated yet made up like Sarah Bernhardt about to take the stage.
Resting on a chaise longue, her feet propped up with a dozen
pillows arranged just so, Doña Carlota wore a quilted pink robe,
streaked with dribbles of orange and purple medicine. She seemed
old and frail, a sugar sculpture of a human that would dissolve in
a light shower. The real shock, however, were her feet, if the
gnarled stumps at the ends of her legs could even be called feet.
They were as misshapen as I imagine the bound feet of Chinese women
might have been. The toes were welded into one striated claw gone
violet from lack of circulation.

“La Metrónoma.” She held her hand up, and I
didn’t know whether to shake it or kiss it. She decided for me by
grabbing the hand I extended and drawing me to her so that I could
kiss her powdered cheek. Up close, I saw that her scalp was
permanently tattooed blue from decades of dying her hair jet black
and that she was painted not like Sarah Bernhardt, but like
herself. Like the silent-movie-vamp self she had been half a
century ago when the portrait that greeted everyone who entered the
Flamenco Academy had been created.

“Did you meet my brother-in-law?” she
asked.

Teófilo grinned.

“Yes, we met at the door.”
Brother-in-law?
The brother of Ernesto, the man Tomás
considered his father? I thought of Teófilo in the faculty parking
lot behind the Flamenco Academy, opening the door of the old Buick.
Her sitting in back, him in front like a chauffeur.

“Teófilo, could you bring me...” She pointed
to a bottle of pills next to the bed and he fetched it.

“Is the pain bad?” he asked her in Spanish,
shaking several capsules onto his callused palm.

She answered in Spanish. Her Castilian, all
the vowels clacking as crisply as a good break in pool, was another
language compared to Teófilo’s softly lyrical New Mexican version.
I recognized the pills. Daddy had taken them toward the end when
the pain had become unbearable. One had always been enough to knock
him out. She swallowed three.

“I’m gonna take off now,” Teófilo said. “You
need anything before I leave?”

She shook her head no.

“
Bueno
, I’ll take the ear then. Work
on it at home.”

He shook my hand with a courtly warmth that
made me want to cling to him. The room seemed much chillier after
he left. With an effort, Doña Carlota swallowed the pills, then
gathered herself and said, “Alma tells me you were sick.” So there
it was. Cards on the table. She was acknowledging that she was
plugged into the flamenco grapevine. That she knew everything. It
was more humiliating than I’d expected it to be. “Are you well
now?”

“Yes, how have you been?”

“Look at me. My feet are destroyed. I hope
you wear good shoes. The feet, the feet take the punishment.”

I nodded. “Yes, Menkes.”

“A good shoe, but there are better.”

“Oh? Which ones do you like?”

Just as I was feeling grateful to Doña
Carlota for saving me with this gift of small talk, she cut it off
and asked, “Have you heard from Tomás?”

His name was a punch in the gut. I searched
her eyes. Were they glassy? Had the drugs taken effect? “No, I
haven’t heard from him for a while now.”

“They chatter. Everyone in flamenco
chatters. It reaches me even here. What we both care about is
Tomás. He cut me out of his life. He won’t speak to me. Tell me,
why is he so unhappy with me?”

“I don’t know.”

“But you have ideas.”

“I have ideas.”

“Metrónoma, if you don’t know why he is
unhappy, you will never make him happy.”

“We’re not together anymore.”

“I know. He’s with your
gemela
.”

“Didi? She’s not my twin.”

“You’re closer than that. You’re one coin.
Two sides.”

“That’s not true either.”

“At first I was surprised that he picked
you. But as I thought about you and him together, it made sense.
Didi? No, that will never work. You, he will come back to you.”

“He will?”

“He needs to be worshipped, doesn’t he?
Didi, the same but worse. Two gods together?” She shook her finger
in front of her face. “This only works in mythology. I know. Why
did you come?”

“I came because—” All the lines I’d
rehearsed in the car on the drive north vanished. I couldn’t
imagine why I had come. I certainly couldn’t imagine asking the
questions I’d planned to ask. “I came to visit. To see how you
are.”

“Metrónoma!” My spine stiffened at the snap
of command in her voice. I expected to feel the grind of her
knuckles in my back next, just as if we were back in class again.
“You’re not a timid little girl anymore. You were always so good
with time. Now is the time for the truth. Tell me what you want.
Dame la verdad
.”

“I want to know why he is unhappy so that I
can be the one to make him happy.”

“Happiness comes from within.”

Her statement was so out of character, such
a blatant lie, that I laughed. “Now who’s not telling the
truth?”

She smiled. “I like you, Metrónoma. You are
exactly what Tomás needs. Not this Didi-Ofelia person. Not La
Tempesta. That will not end well. I would like to see you two
together before I die.”

“You can.” The words rushed out of me. I
knew what I needed from the old lady. I had used Tomás’s secret,
the one Guitos had told me once before to make him choose me. Now I
had to use it again to win him back. To take him from Didi. But
first I had to make Doña Carlota
dame la verdad
. I had to
make her give me the truth. “There was only one Delicata who lived
on Sacromonte and was married to El Chino the blacksmith. Only one
who was
una bailaora
. But this Delicata had dark skin. Dark
as a Moor. And all her children were dark, as dark as the darkest
Gypsy.”

For a moment, the air crackled with the
electricity Doña Carlota had always been able to generate, and once
again she was the fierce, intimidating lioness who had ruled the
classroom. A second later that energy sagged and she slumped back
onto her pillows. “Could you please massage my legs a bit? The
blood has to be encouraged to move into my feet.”

I felt another shift in energy. Perhaps it
was the pain pills taking effect. Perhaps we really did slip into
the foggy zone where fairy tale met flamenco and those bewitched by
love must meet impossible challenges in their quest for love. As I
knelt beside her, my sleeve brushed the dragon’s claw of her foot.
She winced in pain at even that touch. Gently, I rubbed the
still-taut muscles and tendons of her calves until her feet pinked
up from violet to lilac.

“Thank you,” she whispered. I sat down. I
had passed one test.

Bit by bit, she uncoiled as the pills held
pain at bay. Still, it was a long time before she spoke again. When
she did, her voice had a dreamy quality, as if she were asking
herself the questions she had spent her life answering. “Is
flamenco in the blood? The feet? The throat? The fingers? Or is it
in the soul?”

She nodded toward her own ruined
extremities, a small part of the price she had paid for admission.
She didn’t expect me to answer. She waited for the drugs to take
full effect. When all the muscles in her face had gone slack and
her breathing had settled into an even rhythm, she spoke.
“Metrónoma, I have told you the story of one girl, a dancer,
daughter of a Gypsy mother and a Gypsy father, themselves born of
the blood of the pharaoh. Now I will tell you the story of another
girl. It will be for you to decide what to do with the story.
Perhaps it will lead you to love. Perhaps to knowledge. But what is
flamenco except knowledge? Being in the know?
Enterao
?”

Her eyelids drifted shut and she suddenly
seemed not just old and frail but, quite possibly, feeble as well.
I waited several long moments before deciding to leave. The instant
I started to stand, however, her eyes sprang open and she launched
in as if there had been no interruption.

“Her name was Clementina, and if there is
such a thing as blue blood, what ran through the little girl’s
veins was as dark as ink. Clementina was the daughter of a duke and
a duchess born of two of the most venerable houses in the entire
Spanish aristocracy. Her ancestors fought beside Isabel and
Fernando at Granada to beat the Muslims back into Africa and
complete the Reconquest of Spain in 1492. They rode with the
conquistadors to conquer the Incan and Aztec empires. At one time,
you could travel from Granada to Cadiz without ever leaving the
family estates. King Alfonso the Thirteenth and Queen Victoria
Eugenia held the infant Clementina over the baptismal font.

“Clementina grew up on an estate in the very
shadows of Granada’s Alhambra. The floors were laid with
sixteenth-century tiles in strict accordance with the rules of
heraldry as befits a member of the Andalusian aristocracy. The
family patio was paved with Roman mosaics brought from the ruins of
Italica four centuries before her birth. Galleries of Mudejar
columns and arches. Rugs from the Alpujarras, Roman busts,
plateresque railings, family portraits painted by Zuloaga, fans
inscribed with personal dedications by Julio Romero de Torres
himself.

“Clementina had everything a little princess
needed except a queen, because her mother had died in childbirth.
Her father adored his only child, a little girl who resembled her
sainted mother more and more each day, and for this he guarded her.
Perhaps, a bit too jealously. School, of course, was out of the
question. Tía Rogelia, a maiden aunt with whiskers white as bean
sprouts on her chin, taught Clementina to sew and embroider with
stitches the width of a hair. She also taught her to read and
write, which the duke considered superfluous. But mostly she taught
the little girl to accept her
sino
, her fate, which was to
guard her purity with her life until such time as she would be
called upon to surrender it to the son of a suitably noble family
whom the duke would select to be her husband.

“Clementina wondered exactly whom she was
expected to guard her purity from, since the only time she was
allowed to leave the family estate was on Sunday when she and her
father and Tía Rogelia were driven in the duke’s first automobile,
a recently acquired Hispano-Suiza, to the cathedral to attend Mass
with all the other leading families of Granada. Other than that,
the girl was little more than a prisoner in her home. She grew up
without a single friend.