"The Flamenco Academy" (60 page)

A truck lumbering up the mountain blocked me
for several miles on the narrow road. The truck spit bullets of wet
gravel that pinged off the windshield. Each one jangled my nerves,
caused my heart to accelerate. A stab of pain in my neck made me
aware that I was gripping the steering wheel so tightly that my
nails had dug deep grooves into the flesh of my palms.

I followed the directions on the hiker’s map
and turned off onto an unmarked gravel road. For a time, the
cratered road aimed straight at Agua Fria Peak. One face of the
peak was scorched black from the forest fire. The scarred crag
shifted in and out of my vision as the road wobbled eastward.

I was nearly on top of the procession before
I made myself understand that it was not a mirage. Gravel spattered
as I jammed on the brakes. A priest in purple vestments led the
windblown group. Behind him a stocky man, face as long and brown as
a Tiki war god, fought the wind to keep a flapping white satin
banner appliquéd in purple with INRI from being torn out of his
callused hands. On the other side of the banner was a Sacred Heart
wreathed in piercing thorns and stabbed through with a wooden
cross. Perfect tears of crimson blood hung from the organ like
plump fruits. Old women wearing head scarves and plastic shoes
fingered rosaries. The cut-glass beads slipping between the women’s
fingers glinted in the harsh mountain sunlight as corrugated lips
slid over the cycle of prayers. The road widened, giving the
faithful enough room to allow me to pass.

“
Gracias a Dios del cielo: porque es
eterna su misericordia!”
The priest, the youngest in the group
by several decades, intoned a prayer of gratitude for God
delivering his flock from the fires. His followers repeated his
words.

The road rose higher and low-cropped piñon
and sage gave way to tall ponderosa pines, their trunks reticulated
like a herd of frozen giraffes. As I drew closer, then entered
them, the mountains turned from dusty pine green to the cold blue
of granite. I slid into a canyon that abruptly blocked out the sun.
At the corner of my vision, a magpie cartwheeled high above, black
then white, catching the bugs darting through the last flashes of
sun.

The road was walled in by tall pines, their
trunks banked with old, humped snow, black in the shadows. I
downshifted when the tug of the engine grinding up the mountain
became a groan. The lower gear engaged with a shudder that shimmied
through the car body to the sensitive space between my legs. An
artery of pain opened between my jaw and a soft spot behind my
earlobe. I shifted my jaw from side to side, but the pressure
didn’t ease until I pinched my nostrils shut, blew, and swallowed.
My ears crackled, popped, and cleared. I went higher.

Darkness had begun melding all the trees
into one black shape by the time I found the final turnoff. The few
dusty houses that composed La Viuda hugged the road even more
tightly than those of other villages. The village had one store and
it was boarded up. Its flaking sign read EL NORTEÑO, The
Northerner. The name wasn’t referring to the northern part of the
state of the New Mexico. It was talking about the people who’d
settled La Viuda and the south they were northerners to was Mexico.
La Viuda was the last outpost of a fallen empire, the residents
still commemorating the home in Mexico their ancestors had left to
claim this territory for New Spain.

I drove past the houses of the descendants
of the conquistadors. All were made of adobe, all were dissolving
back into the earth. Jerky television light flickered in the
windows. In the driveway of a house at the end of town, an old man
was hunched over an engine working in the harsh illumination of a
light hooked to the raised hood. The car he was working on was Doña
Carlota’s old Buick. The mechanic glanced up and raised a hand in
greeting. It was Teófilo, Doña Carlota’s brother-in-law.

I parked and approached. The old man greeted
me in a mixture of English and Spanish of the archaic type that
charmed visitors from Spain. The kind that must be like hearing
backwoods Appalachians speak Elizabethan English. I told him I was
trying to find Tomás’s cabin and asked if he could give me
directions.

At the mention of Tomás’s name, Teófilo’s
friendliness vanished. He looked away and concentrated on wiping
his hands. I thought he hadn’t understood and repeated my question.
In the silence that fell, I watched a nighthawk swoop down, diving
after the bugs darting through the corona of illumination cast by
the light hooked onto the raised hood. Far off, a coyote howled.
The night fell completely silent again before the old man asked why
I wanted to know where “Tomasito” lived.

I sorted through several answers. “Friend?”
“Former girlfriend?” Finally I answered that we had toured
together. I was a flamenco dancer.

He peered at me skeptically, and though he
smiled, it was obvious I did not look like a flamenco dancer to
him. All I looked like was one of the outsiders he and his
norteño
ancestors had been repelling for centuries. He
shrugged and smiled a smile meant to deflect me and my
question.

For several minutes the old man tightened
bolts; then, with no warning, he said, “You’re her. You’re
Rae.”

“I am.”

“He’s waiting for you.” He pointed to a
light winking in the distance. “Tomasito,” he confided, then asked
me to wait a moment. If I was going up there, he wanted me to take
something to his
sobrino
. He hobbled into his house. The air
had turned cool, almost cold, and smelled of rain and doused
fire.

Teófilo came back cradling a Mason jar
wrapped in a dish towel, handed it to me, and explained that it was
his special posole, made from his brother’s, from Ernesto’s,
recipe. Tomasito had loved his posole since he was a little boy. He
walked me to my car, pointed several more times to the light in the
mountain above, rattled off descriptions of turns, estimations of
mileage, then sent me on my way.

I drove slowly and only found the road by
connecting what looked like a dirt path to the flicker of light
that was Tomás’s cabin. In places, pine branches had grown
completely across the rutted road. They scraped the windshield and
the sides of the car with shrieking sounds.

The cabin was a solitary lantern, glowing
alone in the dark night. As I pulled up, a door opened and Tomás
stepped onto the porch. The headlights illuminated the sparse
calligraphy of dark hair that flicked around his clavicles, the bow
of his upper lip, the clean slope of his nose. It etched every
wrinkle on his face in dark shadow. He seemed tired, bruiseable as
he walked to the car, more a stranger to me than he had been the
night we’d met at the Ace High. I switched off the engine but
didn’t get out. The window beside me was open and he came to
it.

Before he could speak, I said, “I didn’t
come for you. I came for myself.”

My hand rested on the door. He put his next
to it. His nails, the long nails on his right hand, the hand that
played
rasgueos
and plucked
picado
, were gone, cut
now as short as a surgeon’s. He said, “I miss you.”

If I had moved my hand one millimeter toward
his, if I had so much as willed the epidermis to thicken in his
direction, we would have flowed together like pools of mercury. As
we’d done all those times when he’d returned to me smelling of
another woman, I would have tried to retrace and eradicate the
geometry of betrayal. Where Didi had put her hand. Where his mouth
had gone. We’d have reconstructed a painstaking model of the entire
affair just so that he could smash it to bits, repudiate it, tell
me it meant nothing. That I was the one true god and he would have
no other gods before me. Then he would build a cathedral to me on
the site of the false idol’s temple. We would have melted into a
trembling clump and I would not have been able to identify which
molecules were mine and which were his.

We would have done all that because melting
back together was the true reason I was there. I had a hole in my
brain and he was the key that fit it. I shoved the door open,
pushing him away. I had to because he was what I desired most and
must never have again. His cell phone was ringing as we entered.
The ring tone was a sprightly
alegrías
.

“Are you going to answer that?”

He shook his head no.

“Maybe it’s about...” I didn’t have to say
Didi’s name. We both knew who it would be about.

“It’s not. Don’t worry. I’ve got Alma’s
number programmed to play
por siguiriyas
. She said she’d
call. If there was any change.”

The smell of the piñon fire burning in the
fireplace and of the century of piñon fires before it drenched the
old cabin. We sat in front of the fire on straight-backed, wooden
chairs made by people who had been dead for a hundred years before
either one of us had been born. I studied Tomás in the firelight
and realized what had changed: he looked mortal.

He said, “I’m sorry.”

And I answered, “We’re not going to talk
about that.”

“It’s not enough, I know. Nothing will ever
be enough.”

“You are who you are. Didi is who she is.
Neither of you will change and you will devour me if I let you. I
can’t let you. Only one thing has ever really connected us, Doña
Carlota’s story. I am going to give it to you. Then we will be
done.” If, in all the time we were together, I’d ever looked into
and seen the hunger I saw when I told him I was going to give him
Doña Carlota’s story, I’d have known we could be together. But I
hadn’t. I never would. Whatever we’d had was a spindly offshoot of
a tree so massive it cast everything else, even Didi, into
shadow.

He knew that revealing his hunger was a
strategic mistake and said, “Rae, this is the beginning for us, not
the end.”

“Doña Carlota’s stories, her lies, I used
them as passwords to gain admission to your world. It’s time to
surrender them. You are their rightful owner. I don’t have the
entire story, but I will give you what I have.”

Tomás barely breathed as I spoke. It was the
first exchange we’d ever had that wasn’t essentially sexual and it
was stilted and formal. That was as it should have been. I was
fulfilling an obligation akin to the ceremonial returning of bones
to an ancestral burial ground.

Piñon is a fragrant wood, hard and
long-burning. The logs blazed, then burned down to embers in the
time it took me to tell Tomás that what he’d considered his
birthright, the tale of Gypsy ancestors with the power to make the
earth burn and poets weep, belonged to a servant girl named Rosa.
He was rapt but not surprised by the details of his great-aunt’s
lonely and illustrious childhood, its abrupt end in the back room
of a mansion in Granada, her flight with Rosa to Sevilla.

When I had told all that I knew, he was
silent for a long time. His eyes twitched as if adjusting to a
changing light. Finally he said, “I’ve heard all those stories
before. I grew up with them. But my great-aunt was always the dirty
little girl in the cave.”

The obligation of dispatching my duty as
well as I could bound me to say, “I think the next part of the
story, the part she would have told me if she’d had the strength,
was that Rosa might be your grandmother.”

Tomás looked at the ceiling and shook his
head, exasperated. “And think that she chose to lose her strength
at the point that best suited her. Rae, she made me who—what—I am.
That’s what I want you to understand. I want us to be together.
Jesus, this is hard.” He put his open hand on the top of his head
as if he were trying to contain the thoughts burbling up. “I don’t
know how to start. Tía Carlota didn’t like me to speak.”

It struck me that that was the first time
I’d heard Tomás speak the name of the woman who had raised him.

“When I asked for something to drink, she’d
stick a guitar in my hand and tell me to make her feel my thirst.
And to do it
en compás
the way a real Gypsy boy would. I
grew up with stories of how her family had lived in a cave in
Sacromonte. How she saved herself and her family from poverty with
her dancing. She told me the stories of the sufferings of her
people. Of
our
people.
My
people.

“I grew up like one of the Romanovs. Like I
had hemophilia, something in my blood that made me special but was
a curse. That was how I thought of flamenco. That I was doomed to
flamenco because I was
gitano por cuatro costaos
. She told
me that my real mother was a relative, a great-niece or the
daughter of a cousin. The story changed. When I was old enough, she
told me my mother had been a drug addict who didn’t want her
identity revealed. It didn’t matter. What mattered was that I was
gitano por cuatro costaos
and that my mother had given me up
on one condition: that I be raised as
un flamenco
. That I
learn our people’s art, flamenco, but
flamenco puro
.

“She stuck a guitar in my hands when I was
three and told me that Sabicas had started when he was two and I
was already behind. When I was hungry, she wouldn’t feed me until I
could make her feel my hunger. Play my hunger for her on the
guitar. When I got tired, bored, she’d ask me what would have
happened if our people, exiled from their home, wandering for
centuries, for so long that they even forgot where home was,
despised and persecuted wherever they went, what would have
happened if they had given up?

“Flamenco was all I knew growing up. School
was my reward. If my playing was going well enough, she allowed me
to go to school. If not, no school. We didn’t have a TV in the
house, most of the books were in Spanish. Biographies of Carmen
Amaya, of Sabicas. I didn’t learn to speak English that well and
the Spanish I learned from her and Tío Ernesto was like something
out of another century. Something that made me an outsider to the
other kids in Santa Fe. So I didn’t have friends. I had
flamenco.