"The Flamenco Academy" (62 page)

I took four
compases
to stand, just
as Doña Carlota had taught us. With each one, my memory of the old
woman who raised Tomás became clearer. I felt her in my arms, in my
blood as the sacred rhythms coursed through me in the same way
they’d coursed through her. I deciphered the history encoded in
each
compás
. Wisdom surged up from my feet and, for that
moment, the space of four
compases
, I understood why the old
lady had given her life, why she’d tried to give Tomás’s, to
el
arte
.

One by one, each of the other twelve
bailaoras
stood and joined me. Alma, the soul of the
flamenco program; Liliana, the star from the class ahead of ours;
Blanca, the sweet one; Yolanda; we all stood. Didi was the last.
She was wobbly and gray as pavement. Her nose was still red where
they had fed a tube into her stomach. She faltered and everyone in
the chapel leaned forward to catch her. But she found her balance,
took her place beside me. In unison, we twined our arms up,
dragging up scoops of perfumed air with each languid twirl.

Behind us Doña Carlota rested in her coffin
as cold as Queen Isabel ever was lying beside Fernando and her mad
daughter, Juana, in the chilly fastness of Granada’s cathedral
shadowed by the castle of vanished Arabs floating in the sun above
the city.

Didi and I danced, side by side. We’d done
these steps so many times that she didn’t need to look at me. I
didn’t need to look at her. We followed the pulses Tomás strummed
on the guitar as if they were pitons hammered into a wall of sound
guiding our hands, our feet. We reached a hand up, grabbed for the
next one, and lifted ourselves higher.

A choir sang from the loft above our heads,
releasing an avalanche of crystalline sound.

Señor, Dios de la vida

Concédele a mi alma

Tu gracia divina

Lord, God of life,

grant my soul

your divine grace

Porque soy pecador

Dios mío de mi alma

Ay! Ten compasión!

Because I am a sinner,

God of my soul,

Ay! Have compassion!

Five guitarists fanned a ravishing guitar
introduction to the Kyrie. They fell silent and Tomás plucked a
series of
falsetas
so poignant and ethereal that they turned
the small chapel in La Viuda into the grand cathedral in Granada.
Guitos’s
temple
, the plangent warble of
Ay
,
transformed it into the
Judería
, the
Albaicín
, the
Jewish, the Moorish neighborhoods echoing with the quavering voices
of cantors, of muezzins, in the days before the Moors and Jews were
expelled. He sang and made us all walk the dusty paths of
Sacromonte.

Señor, ten piedad, Señor, ten piedad.

Lord have mercy. Christ have mercy.

Señor, ten piedad, Señor, ten piedad.

Lord have mercy. Christ have mercy.

Señor, ten piedad, Señor, ten piedad.

Lord have mercy. Christ have mercy.

I turned and faced Didi. It was astonishing
how well we two had learned the code. Every flick of her wrist,
every stamp of her heel, held meaning. I translated each dot, each
dash. Didi hung back on the beat, allowing me to surge forward to
take the lead in a dance that had no lead. All we had was the
solitary promise flamenco ever makes, the promise of eternity if
you can create one moment beautiful enough to be called true.

That moment the
compás
unlocked not
the truth of my brain, but the truth buried in my bones. I
remembered Didi with the tips of her hair dyed lime green. I
remembered the first morning she picked me up in the Skankmobile. I
remembered squatting next to her on the West Mesa above a puddle of
my own tears while she forced me to say that Daddy would always be
with me. I remembered and I danced my joy that she was alive.
Behind the anger, disappointment, and betrayal, there was that
truth to tell: I was happy that she still breathed. In the end, I
had not wanted her dead.

Didi’s dance was hectic, out of
compás
. A flurry of apologies, an atonement not for any of
the things she’d done, but for being the person who’d had to do
them. Behind the frenzy the truth Didi danced was that, in spite of
everything, she loved me more than she loved herself. It was the
imperfect love of a girl who had lived her life on the pitchfork of
renown, who’d believed she wasn’t there if no one was watching. It
was the love she had to give. She gave it to me.

We twelve dancers twined about one another.
Our skirts rose and fell in perfect time, forming a child’s
curlicue of breaking waves. The chorus joined Guitos and sang, “You
are the voice of the way. The joy of life. The light of the world.
The salt of the earth.”

I danced my gratitude for all the doors Didi
had opened and pulled me through. All the stuffy rooms she had
dragged me out of. I danced for the four of us, Clementina and
Rosa, Didi and me. We four had been girls who’d wanted real
families, real mothers. What we had found was each other. And
flamenco.

We raised our arms to honor Doña Carlota
Clementina Montenegro de Anaya’s life. I honored it in all its
manifestations. All its contradictions. I honored her fierceness.
Her talent. I honored the truth she had told, the truth she had not
been able to tell.

Tomás’s head bent over his guitar. His
compases
were so sturdy that time itself danced on them. He
sliced time in half, then thirds, then again, until each moment
expanded in front of me and I had time enough for everything. Time
to put
triples
on all the footwork. Time to understand.
Tomás looked up from his playing and made the one request that
flamenco makes:
Dame la verdad
. Give me the truth.

I waded again into the familiar sea of his
toque
and danced. It was time to tell my truth.

I walked out of that tiny chapel in northern
New Mexico almost two years ago. The truth I’d finally told was
that I had a hole in my brain and Tomás had the key and Didi had
the key and, one way or another, we would all be locked together
forever if I remained. I wanted to put an ocean between us, but the
most I could afford was one international boundary. Vancouver has
an unexpectedly vibrant flamenco scene. I found a teaching job the
first week I was here. The studio pays me in cash since I don’t
have a work visa. My real job, though, is learning how to be the
major player in my own life. I’d been a member of the supporting
cast for so long that it was awkward at first. For the first few
months, I let myself be guided by the question WWDD?—What would
Didi do?—and extrapolated from the answers.

Since the first thing Didi would have
done was find her own supporting cast, I started a dance troupe. We
melded instantly: a pair of sisters from a Hong Kong banking
family; a Ukrainian guy with a blond braid thick as my wrist; a
chunky Japanese girl who had studied flamenco in Tokyo since she
was four; a belly dancer from Marrakech; an assortment of grunge
kids with blond dreadlocks, tattoos of salmon, and multiple
piercings; an African Canadian who can’t stay
en compás
to
save her life but has almost more stage presence than anyone I’ve
ever seen. Almost. I tell her she reminds me of someone but don’t
tell her who. Didi’s isn’t a name I’m ready to start dropping. We
make a good troupe, we flamenco misfits. We fight. We laugh. We
dance. We’re a tribe.

For the first year, I would come nearly
every morning to watch the sunrise. It was a way to keep myself
from answering Didi’s letters, Tomás’s phone calls. A way to keep
from going back. I never hid from them. That would have been
clinging and I was letting go.

I have careful conversations with my mother.
I call once a week on Tuesday evening and we speak from precisely
eight until eight-twenty. Safe within that cage of minutes, my
mother feels free to expand. She tells me which quilt patterns are
selling the best. She tells me who has become a “disruptive
influence on the community.” She tells me that they are doing well
with the herbs, the radicchio, and organic blueberries they grow
now to support “the work.”

It is impossible not to keep up with
Tomás and Didi. Tomás called his last CD
El Norteño
and
dedicated it to “La Viuda and the true people of my blood.” The
interviews that followed kicked up quite a storm. Tomás renounced
all claims to Gypsy heritage, stating that he was “Nuevo
Mexicano
por cuatro costaos
,” As a “New Mexican on four
sides,” Tomás was embraced even more wholeheartedly than he had
ever been before. An entire continent, not just a rarefied clique
of
aficionados
, saw him as their own. His story was
irresistible. The story alone would have propelled him to regional
fame. His talent and beauty guaranteed an ocean of national, then
international, ink with its attendant adulation.

Just last week, I read about Didi’s
latest triumph. Like all flamencos, my knees and spine are starting
to require attention and I have been seeing a chiropractor. With
the aromatherapy machine wafting a soothing blend of lavender and
bergamot around the reception area, I leafed through a pile of
magazines, passing up
Runner’s World
and
Yoga Journal
in favor of the current issue of
Frisson, The Magazine of
Cultural Exploration.

It was a shock to find her staring at me
from a full page photo. Didi didn’t seem as if she had aged so
much, as she’d finally grown into the world-weariness she’d been
born with. In the accompanying review, her latest production,
Ofelia Unbound
, was called “a one-woman show that channeled
Federico García Lorca, Carmen Amaya, and Judy Garland.” The review
went on to say that “in a vertiginous performance, La O teeters
perilously close to the very edge of self-immolation.”

La O. It must be a promotion to move from
being a one-name celebrity to a one-letter celebrity.

The evidence of Didi and Tomás’s fame calms
me. The world sees what I had always seen. Others are as captivated
as I had been from the very first moment. I wasn’t crazy. I was
never crazy.

In a few minutes, at our regular time just
after sunrise, Collin will join me. We’ll walk along English Bay
and throw sticks for the two big dogs we adopted from the pound.
I’ll see in his kind attention to them, in his joy in their
progress from malnourished discards to sleek beauties, the good
father he will be to the children he wants to have with me. The air
will be cool and moist. We’ll nod at other couples passing in the
opposite direction. Collin and I will find a private piece of
driftwood to sit on and watch the sun, a courteous and remote sun,
rise unobtrusively. In the soft, morning light, Collin will gaze at
me and I’ll see the same grateful astonishment on his face that I
used to beam onto Didi.

For Collin, I am as exotic and wild and free
as Didi was for me. I’ve pulled him through more doors and out of
more of the studio rooms where he made an early fortune with
computers than he’d ever dreamed of. Collin will be wearing
something fleecy, a vest, a jacket the color of moss, of a fawn. He
never wears black. He will make his body into a cradle to hold me
while we watch the end of the soft pink sunrise reflect off orange
hulls of tankers from China, from Liberia, from the Netherlands. He
will kiss my neck. He will say he wants our children to have my
lips. I will say his eyes. He will lock his arms around me and ask
where I want to go for coffee. Because Collin reminds me of all the
good things about my father, I will suggest a bakery in a
neighborhood off West Broadway where a lot of new immigrants from
the Czech Republic have settled. I will buy kolaches filled with
blueberries that are better than any I ever ate in Houdek and
Collin will tease me about “my people, the pink people.”

The waves roll in all the way from Asia and
pound the shore just beyond my safe square of blanket. My mug of
tea has gone cold. The glitter of phosphorescence fades as the sky
lightens with a murky, opalescent glow announced by the barest
tinge of rose at the edges. The soft pastel awakening suits me.
This isn’t the diamond-sharp morning of New Mexico, colors so
bright they pierce your eyes. The sun, even fully risen on this
misty day, is a whisper compared to that full-throated shout. Here,
beside the ocean, in the milky light, a person is not forced to
examine every detail. I can stop for a while, puzzling out whose
story it was and what my part in it had been. For a moment, I can
simply watch the gulls gliding above the sea, knifing in, then
soaring back up.

In the light, there are other distractions
to take my attention from the pounding of the waves. Bulbous-headed
tubes of seaweed coil along the beach like dozing anacondas. Crabs
skitter past, scratching wavering lines in the packed sand. An
astounding bouquet of pulpy starfish in violet, mauve, ultramarine,
coral, blossoms in a tidal pool. Starfish arms entwine comically
like rubber-legged drunks holding each other up.

The pounding recedes. The waves slosh
in.

I toss out the last of my cold tea. Memory
is a luxury I only allow myself once a week. Twice at the most. I
limit the time I spend asking why. I have already lost so many
years, I can’t afford to waste another moment looking back. All I
care about now is what is ahead.

Some would say I settled, but they are
wrong. I like my new life. I like the soft air, the pink sun. I
like performing with my troupe. I like throwing sticks for the dogs
and deciding where to have coffee. I like being the one sought
after; the exotic, wild, free one. The one who loves a little less.
Perhaps those who would say I’ve settled have never known the
shadows. For me, being, not the tallest, but a tree tall enough to
feel the sun on my leaves, has been worth everything.