"The Flamenco Academy" (57 page)

“No, no, no!” I silenced the weak stamping
with a wave. “Not this.” I mocked the puny taps with a few
inaudible heel pats. “This!” I hammered the floor. Everything I had
learned at the Flamenco Academy poured back into my head. I opened
my mouth and knowledge ran out. “Aim for a place one inch
beneath
the floor. If you’re going to make a mistake in
flamenco, make a
loud
mistake! Make
your
mistake!
Y otra vez!
Try it again!
Tacón! Tacón!
” I pounded my
heel, showing both the dance and the language it had to be taught
in. “
Y punta!
I shifted between the heel and toe. “Louder!
Okay, twice with each foot! Louder!”

A clattering chaos echoed back to me.

“Now this!” I demonstrated the basic
heel-toe combination. “Start with a
golpe
!
Golpe
!
Stamp! Tap! Tap! Stamp!
Y UNO! Dos. Tres. UNO! Dos. Tres.
UNO!
”

Behind me, the class stamped their feet.
They felt the first intimations of what it was to turn your body
into a machine that produced rhythm. All the students were staring
at their feet as if their toes were on fire. I passed among them,
tapping each woman under her chin, forcing her head up.

“
Cabeza
!
Arriba
! Keep those
heads up!
Cuerpo
! Bodies up!”

The heads went up and we began again. Then,
without their eyes telling their feet what to do, flamenco went
where it was supposed to go, straight into the heart. The smiles of
apology for all the mistakes their feet were making disappeared as
the class tried to echo the beat I clapped out.

“
Y los brazos!”
I held my arms in a
circle in front of me.

“
Fuerte! Fuerte!
Strong!” I patrolled
the class, stiffening arms, making them stake out claims to the
space around them. “No bellyache arms!” I ordered a student with
the profile of an Aztec princess, just as Doña Carlota had when
she’d corrected my own tentative, retracted arms. The student’s
arms rose, making perfect, sweet dimples appear at the back of her
shoulders.

The class concentrated on their arms and the
foot stamping became feeble and unfocused. I waved my arms. “Stop!
Stop! I can’t stand the sound of those sick kitten paws! Now, let
me hear those feet!”

They picked up the volume and I spoke louder
in order to be heard above the fumble-footed noise. “Flamenco is
not the fox-trot! There is no box step in flamenco!” When all my
students were gazing ahead, pounding out whatever beat they could
manage, I announced,
“Al frente!”
pointed forward, and
started walking, all the while keeping the beat with raised arms.
The addition of bipedal locomotion threw the students into rictuses
of concentration. They all looked as if they were adding long
columns of numbers in their heads. It was exactly how I had looked
my first class.

Wanting to keep this momentum going, I
barked at them like a drill instructor. “Flamenco is all about
showing what’s inside of you! Telling the truth! The First
Commandment of flamenco is,
Dame la verdad!
Who can tell us
what that means?”

The Aztec princess shouted out, “Give me the
truth!”

“
Bueno!
Give me the truth! Give it to
me, ladies! Stamp! Come on! Make some noise! You’re not in Kansas
anymore! This isn’t Barbie World! Don’t hide those unpleasant
feelings! Use them! What makes you mad? Who in here is mad?”

I studied the students behind me in the
mirror. Nobody responded.

“Nobody? Nobody is mad? How is this
possible?” This both astonished and annoyed me to a degree far out
of proportion to the instructional question I had posed. It
suddenly seemed desperately urgent to wring the truth from this
collection of novices. In the mirror, I caught the eye of a
sun-spotted lady visiting from Tucson and demanded, “Anybody in
here work for a big man who takes all the credit while you do all
the work?” The lady lifted her head and started stamping her
feet.

I scanned the rest of the group. “Any of you
in here work three times as hard as your jerk of a boss and make
one-third his salary?” Smiles of recognition played across several
faces and the tempo picked up. “When you get that shitty little
basket of flowers on Secretaries Day, do you want to shove it up
his fat ass?” The smiles turned to grins. “Okay! You
are
mad. Dance that!”

I studied the rest of the students. Figuring
out how to get them to admit their anger seemed like the most
important thing I’d ever done in my life. I zoomed in on the girl
with the tongue stud and asked, “When you turn on the television
and realize your country is an oil oligarchy, does that make you
mad?” Her many piercings caught the overhead light as she lifted
her head and hammered the hardwood.

I caught a couple of helmet-haired students
who’d said they were from Dallas exchanging eye rolls and asked
them, “Are you sick and tired of liberals with their hackneyed,
knee-jerk idiocies always blaming America for everything that’s
wrong in the world? Then pound the ground!”

I zeroed in on a clump of Latinos. “Does it
annoy you that you paid good money for this class and now you’ve
got some skinny gringa standing up here yelling at you? Are you
totally sick of Anglos appropriating every scrap of your culture?
Okay, show me you’re pissed off!” They smiled good-naturedly even
as their feet picked up volume.

I spotted a shy girl trying to avoid eye
contact and asked, “Does anyone in here ever get sick of people
always telling you to smile? To speak up? Speak out? Whatever? Do
you think there is entirely too much speaking up and out? Do you
wish people would just shut up and leave you alone?”

The girl kept her eyes on the ground, but I
could hear her feet and feel the breeze from her whirling skirt as
she joined in.

“Who in here is mad?” I asked, because there
was still one person in the studio who was not giving the truth.
The answer sprang from my feet, from my gut. It leapt from every
muscle fiber in my body. My body was telling me the truth,
delivering it in a thundering sermon that even I could not
ignore.

“Who in here is mad?”

I smashed the floor with my answer: Me. I
was mad. I had to dance it and see it in the mirror in front of me
before I could accept its immensity. Rage leached out of my bones
and poured into my feet. I thought of all the years I had wasted
being a handmaiden and my foot came down like an anvil. My fury was
not for Didi, Doña Carlota, Tomás, my mother. My fury was for me.
For telling everyone else’s story but my own.

I stamped harder. I stamped so hard a
shimmer of light of the sort that announces a migraine haloed my
sight. A radiant nimbus oscillated around my reflection in the
mirror, making it hard for me to recognize the savage dancer there,
striking sparks of fire with her blazing footwork, the intensity of
her passion. I felt disembodied, possessed. Behind me, the class
teetered to a halt, then froze watching me, jaws hanging open.

“
It burns the blood like powdered
glass... it exhausts, rejects all the sweet geometry we
understand... it shatters styles.”
I felt the whisper of Didi’s
breath against my ear just as I had when she’d quoted Lorca’s
definition of
duende
to me in the hidden park.

I was possessed and I was exhausted. I had
forsaken sweet geometry. I stopped, planted myself on the earth,
hurled my arms to the right, then the left. I shook off both demons
and angels. I regained control of myself, and with my next word I
erased all that had gone before and opened a blank page upon which
to begin once more:
“Y!”
And.

I stopped. The class gathered behind me,
ready to follow wherever I led, and I began again.

“
Fuerte! Brazos! Cuerpo! Arriba! Cabeza!
Arriba!”
We stormed across the floor, each student staking an
emphatic claim to every inch we advanced. For just a minute, two at
the most, all the heels hit the beat exactly in time with mine and
we became one tribe, a tribe of wild, clacking, frenzied girls
making a sound louder and more beautiful than any sound they had
ever dreamed of making on their own.

At the end of class, I rushed from the
Flamenco Academy, still dripping with sweat. The one, true gospel
of flamenco that I had just preached more to myself than to my
students still thundered in my blood:
Fuerte! Cuerpo! Arriba!
Cabeza! Arriba! Strong! Body! Up! Head! Up!
I paused in front
of the looming portrait of Doña Carlota. Then I hoisted my head as
high as it would go and settled it decisively upon my ramrod of a
spine. I raised my middle digit and I shot Doña Carlota a big, fat
bird.

I strode out of the Flamenco Academy,
believing that my moment of
duende
had transformed me, that
I was through with being a handmaiden. I would serve no one else
but myself. I would obey no one else’s desires but my own. When I
confronted the banner outside the gym announcing Didi’s performance
at the KiMo that night, however, I was stunned to discover that I
could no longer identify what I really wanted. My first thought was
that, of course, I didn’t want to see Didi. I never wanted to see
or speak to her again. But, in the past, I had always made a point
of seeing every performance during the festival. If I stayed away,
wouldn’t Didi still be controlling my life? In the end, I went. I
went to prove to myself that I could. That I could sit in an
audience and watch Didi. Just so long as I didn’t have to speak to
her. That was the bargain I struck with myself.

The scorched air was still hot that evening
as I walked down Central Avenue toward the KiMo Theatre. It was as
if the forest fire smoke had sealed the day’s heat into the city,
not allowing it to cool off as Albuquerque usually did once the sun
went down. Lightning sliced through the sky above the West Mesa, a
summer electrical storm of the sort that promised but almost never
yielded rain.

The exterior of the theater with its
thunderbirds and zias elaborately painted in shades of gold and
blue glittered beneath the lights of a marquee that spelled out
OFELIA. The KiMo was a twenties fantasy collision of art deco and
pueblo style where residents once watched vaudeville, then the new
talkies. The only tickets left for Didi’s show were in the balcony,
which is exactly where I wanted to be. I bought one and, for the
second night in a row, was grateful to be late and entering a
theater where the houselights had already been dimmed. The stairs
leading up to the balcony were lined with panoramic murals. Each
panel depicted one of the mythical Seven Cities of Cíbola, the
Cities of Gold that had lured the conquistadors ever farther north,
all the way up to the Spaniards’ last frontier outposts on the
Camino Real: the city they named after El Duque de Alburquerque;
Santa Fe, the city of Holy Faith; Truchas; Peñasco; Taos.

In the balcony, air vents were disguised as
Navajo rugs and chandeliers as war drums and death canoes. Ceiling
beams, textured to look like logs, were painted with dance and hunt
scenes. Rows of garlanded longhorn steer skulls with amber eyes
glowing eerily stared down at me. In their dim light, I found my
row and felt my way to a seat, stumbling over a backpack.

“Sorry,” a young woman, her hair a
pre-Raphaelite cloud in the darkness, whispered to me, shoving the
book-anchored pack out of my way as I took the empty seat next to
her. I recognized her from one of the classes I had substitute
taught. In the reflection of the stage lights her face seemed as if
it had been printed that very morning. A book almost finished but
never opened. She’d never had a class with Didi. Might not have
ever seen the disdain in which Didi was held by those of the
flamenco puro
school who considered the academy’s biggest
star a complete fraud. To her, Didi was Ofelia and Ofelia was
famous.

Onstage, hundreds of votive candles
flickered in amber and red holders on and around an altar. Arrayed
around the altar were dozens of vases filled with roses from the
pastel/sunset color group. Both the roses and the candles were
backdrops to the stool where Ofelia/Didi would sit. It was draped
with a black shawl, a genuine
mantón
from Madrid with a
fringe that shimmied in air currents no one else was sensitive
enough to feel.

The house was packed with Didi’s obsessive
fans, most of whom couldn’t have cared less about flamenco and how
pure or impure Didi was. Virtually all were female, their faces
frozen into expectant expressions of adoration that Nancy Reagan
could have learned from. Then, before I even registered why, my
heart lurched. It was him—Tomás—sitting half a dozen rows ahead. I
could tell, just from the tilt of his shoulders, the dark curl of
his hair. Of course he would be here. Then he turned. It was a
student. Someone who looked the way he had all those years ago when
I’d fallen in love with him at first sight. I pressed back into my
seat, my heart still pounding, scrambling to reclaim the righteous
anger that had steeled me earlier in the day. But when a team of
five guitarists filed onstage, my breath clutched again. They were
led by old-time
gitano
flamenco legend Diego Herredia. Will
was among them. Tomás was not. I exhaled. The crowd of hardcore
aficionados
pounded their palms together for Diego. Nearly
eighty, he padded slowly to the straight-backed chair where his
instrument waited. His double-knit pants, pulled up a little too
high, cradled the low-slung lobes of his old-man’s buttocks. He
took his seat, pants hiking up still farther, exposing garters
holding up black socks.

The four other guitarists followed his lead.
Softly, though with great power, they began playing an
alegrías
. The low undercurrent of sophisticated chatter
stopped cold as every member of the audience was connected into the
rhythm machine that is flamenco. With five great guitarists
playing, it was impossible to resist. Didi knew what she was doing.
After this warm-up, she could have came out and recited “Little
Jack Horner” and enthralled. Plus, Diego’s old-time playing would
sanctify the bleedings of her suburban girl heart with enough
flamenco authenticity to placate the purists.