The Cuban took Maggie’s hand and, in front of the mirror, led her through the dance. The rest of the class watched, several of them hoping that she would flounder. Her brow might have been furrowed with concentration but Maggie remembered every move and half-turn that they had been working on that night and was step-perfect.There was a ripple of applause as the dance finished.
Sonia was impressed. It had taken her weeks to get as far as Maggie had in half an hour.
‘How did you manage that?’ she asked Maggie over a glass of Rioja in the wine bar afterwards.
She admitted that some years ago she had done some salsa on a trip to Spain and had not forgotten the basic technique. ‘It’s like riding a bike,’ she said nonchalantly,‘once learned, never forgotten.’
Within a few sessions, her enthusiasm surpassed even Sonia’s and, with few other commitments in her life, Maggie began going to a salsa club, dancing in the darkness with hundreds of others until five in the morning.
In a few weeks it was to be Maggie’s thirty-fifth birthday.
‘We’re going dancing in Spain,’ she announced.
‘That sounds fun,’ said Sonia. ‘With Candy?’
‘No, with you. I’ve got the tickets. Forty pounds return to Granada. It’s done. And I’ve booked us some dance classes while we’re there.’
Sonia could imagine exactly how badly this would go down with James, but there was no question of refusing Maggie. She knew for sure that her friend would have little sympathy for any kind of vacillation. Maggie was a free spirit and never understood how anyone could give up their liberty to come and go as they pleased. But most importantly for Sonia, she did not want to refuse. Dance already seemed like a driving force in her life and she was addicted to the sense of release it gave.
‘How fantastic!’ she said. ‘When exactly?’
The trip was in three weeks’ time, to tie in with the day of Maggie’s birthday.
James’s froideur was no surprise. If James had disliked his wife’s new interest in dancing, his antagonism intensified when she had announced this trip to Granada.
‘Sounds like a hen party,’ he had said dismissively. ‘Bit old for that kind of thing, aren’t you?’
‘Well, Maggie did miss out on the whole wedding thing, so perhaps that’s why she’s making such a celebration of a big birthday.’
‘Maggie . . .’As ever, James’s contempt for Maggie was ill concealed. ‘Why didn’t she ever get married? Like everyone else?’
He could see what Sonia saw in her university friends, her colleagues and the various acquaintances she had made within sugar-borrowing distance of their home, but his attitude to Maggie was different. As well as being part of his wife’s dim and distant schooldays, Maggie did not fit into any boxes and he could not begin to see why Sonia kept in touch with her.
Far away from her husband, under the sympathetic gaze of a cheaply reproduced Virgin Mary in the breakfast room of the Hotel Santa Ana, Sonia realised that she had ceased to care what James thought of her unconventional friend.
Maggie appeared, bleary-eyed at the doorway.
‘Hi, sorry I’m late. Have I got time for coffee?’
‘No, not if we’re going to get there for the start of the class. We’d better go straight away,’ instructed Sonia, keen to obstruct any further procrastination that Maggie might be dreaming up. In the daytime, Sonia felt she was in charge. At night, she knew they would swap roles. It had never been any different.
They went out into the street and were taken aback by the sharp air. There were few people about: a handful of elderly folk with small dogs on leads, and the rest sitting in cafés. Most shop fronts were still hidden behind metal grilles, with only bakeries and cafés showing signs of life, the alluring fragrance of sweet pastries and churros scenting the air. Many of the cafés were already densely fogged with the steam of coffee machines and cigarette smoke. Most of the city would only really stir itself in another hour. Until then, early risers like Sonia and Maggie would have the narrow streets almost to themselves.
Sonia hardly looked up from her map, following the twists and turns of the alleyways and passageways to steer them to their destination. Every step of the way was guided by the blue lettering of the ceramic street signs, the musical charm of the names - Escuelas, Mirasol, Jardines - taking them closer. They crossed a recently hosed-down square, sloshing through puddles of water, and passing by a glorious flower stall that was set up between two cafés, its huge fragranced blooms luminous. The smooth slabs of the marble pavement were soft underfoot and the fifteen-minute walk seemed like five.
‘We’re here,’ announced Sonia triumphantly, folding the map into her pocket. ‘La Zapata. This is it.’
It was a tatty building. Layers of small posters had built up over the years on the walls of its façade, one after the other stuck over the brickwork advertising flamenco, tango, rumba and salsa evenings taking place all over the city. Every phone box, lamppost and bus-shelter in the city seemed to have been used in the same way, informing passers-by of forthcoming espectáculos, one flyer plastered over another often before it had even taken place. It was a chaotic kind of collage but it represented the spirit of this city and the profusion of dance and music that was its lifeblood.
The inside of La Zapata was as scruffy as the exterior. There was nothing glamorous about it.This was not a place for performance but for practice and rehearsal.
Four doors led from the hallway. Two were open, two shut. From behind one closed door could be heard the sound of thunderous stamping. A herd of bulls charging down a street would not have made more noise. It stopped abruptly and was followed by the sound of rhythmic clapping, like the patter of raindrops after a thunderstorm.
A woman bustled purposefully past them and down an unlit corridor. Steel heel- and toecaps clip-clopped on the stone floor and music burst through a briefly opened door.
The two Englishwomen stood reading the framed posters advertising performances that had taken place decades earlier, slightly unsure what they should do. Eventually Maggie got the attention of a skeletally thin and tired-looking woman of about fifty, who seemed to run the place from a dark cubbyhole within the reception area.
‘Salsa?’ said Maggie, hopefully.
With a perfunctory nod, the woman acknowledged their presence. ‘Felipe y Corazón - allí,’ she said, pointing emphatically to one of the open doors.
They were the first in the studio. They put their bags in the corner and changed their shoes.
‘I wonder how many of us there will be,’ mused Maggie, doing up her buckles. Her statement required no response.
A mirror ran across one end of the room and a wooden bar ran down another. It was a clinical space with high windows that overlooked a narrow street, and even if the glass had not been opaque with dirt, little daylight would have entered the room. A strong smell of polish seeped from the dark wooden floor worn smooth by years of wear.
Sonia loved the slightly musty smell of age and usage that emanated from the walls of this room, the way that the cracks between the boards had filled with dust, grime and wax. She noticed the way fluff had mounted up between the segments of the ancient old radiators and saw silvery cobweb threads wafting gently from the ceiling. In each layer of dust there was another decade of the place’s history.
Half a dozen other people drifted into the studio. There was a group of Norwegian students (mostly girls) all doing Spanish Studies at university, and then a few additional men in their early twenties appeared, all of them locals.
‘They must be what are called “taxi dancers”,’ Maggie whispered to Sonia. ‘It said in the brochure that they hire them in to balance up the numbers.’
Eventually, their instructors appeared. Felipe and Corazón were both raven-haired and as lean as young calves, but their weathered skin betrayed that they were well into their sixties. Corazón had evenly spaced rows of deep lines on her bony face, not etched there just by the passing of time, but through e
xpressiveness and the unashamed exaggeration of her emotions.Whenever she smiled, laughed and grimaced it took its toll on her skin. Both were dressed in black, which accentuated their slimness, and against the whiteness of the room, they stood out like silhouettes.
The group of twelve had spread themselves out, all of them facing their instructors.
‘Hola!’ they said in unison, smiling broadly at the group lined up expectantly in front of them.
‘Hola!’ chorused the group, like a class of well-disciplined six year olds.
Felipe carried a CD player, which he set down on the floor. He pressed ‘play’ and the space they shared was transformed. The joyful sound of a trumpet introduction pierced the air. The class automatically mirrored Corazón’s movements. It did not take a word from her, it was simply obvious that this was her intention. For a while the class warmed up gently, turning wrists and ankles, flexing heels, stretching necks and shoulders, and rotating hips. All the while they kept their eyes fixed on their teachers, fascinated by their pipe-cleaner bodies.
Though they had grown up in the flamenco tradition, Felipe and Corazón had seen which way the wind was blowing. In teaching terms, the Cuban-originated dance of salsa was more commercial and would appeal to an audience who might not be drawn to the dramatic intensity of flamenco. Some dancers of their age still performed, but Felipe and Corazón knew that they could not make a decent living out of doing so. Their strategy had worked. They had mastered salsa and created new choreographies, attracting many Granadinos as well as foreigners to their classes. They liked salsa; it was more superficial, less emotionally draining than their true passion, like a light Jerez next to a full-bodied Rioja.
For a few years there had been a steady wave of people wanting to learn salsa and Felipe and Corazón, old and experienced as they were, had no difficulty in becoming experts. Given a short demonstration of the steps, the pair could have danced any dance in the world. Just as musicians with perfect pitch can listen to a complex tune and then repeat it back, note perfect, and then a second time with variations and inversions, so it was with these two. One day they might watch a series of moves and the very next they had mastered it, having observed the male and female parts just a single time.
Salsa instruction now began. It was Corazón who did most of the shouting. Her voice cut through the music and even the strident tone of jazz trumpet that blasted its way through the salsa tune.
‘Y un, dos, tres! Y un, dos, tres! And! Clap! Clap! Clap! And! Clap! Clap! Clap! And . . .’
On she went. Repetition, after repetition, after repetition of the beat until it would haunt them and penetrate their dreams. Every turn their pupils mastered was greeted with huge encouragement and enthusiasm.
‘Eso es!’ That’s it!
When it was time to move on, to try something new, Felipe would call out: ‘Vale!’ OK! And a demonstration of the next turn, or vuelta, would commence.
‘Estupendo!’ the teachers would cry out, unashamed of the hyperbole.
Between attempts at each new move, the women would move round one partner, so that by the end of the lesson’s first half, they had danced with all of the taxi dancers. Even if none of them could speak English, these young men were all fluent in the language of salsa.
‘I love this,’ said Maggie as she passed Sonia on the dance floor.
In dancing, mused Sonia, perhaps Maggie showed her true self. She certainly looked happy being passed across a man’s body this way and that, her hand running down the back of his neck to an instruction given precisely by him. A dismissive flick of his hand was all that was required to tell her when to spin. She responded on the beat, without hesitation. Sonia watched her friend being used to demonstrate a complex sequence of steps and found it strange that Maggie seemed so attracted to a dance where the man played an entirely dominant role. The feisty feminist who wanted to be in charge seemed happy being twirled.
Maggie received praise from the teachers and an expression that Sonia remembered from schooldays passed across her face. It was a look of slight surprise, accompanied with a huge beam of pleasure.
There was a break when big jugs of iced water were brought in and poured into plastic cups. It had become stifling in the room and everyone drank thirstily while polite snippets of stilted conversation were exchanged between people of different nationalities.
When they had quenched their thirst, the two Englishwomen went off to the cloakroom. Sonia noticed huge quantities of graffiti, particularly several sets of initials heavily scored into the old wood. Some of the scratches had almost been polished away through the passing years, and others were freshly done, the recent carvings still the colour of naked flesh. One particularly ornate set of letters reminded her of a church carving, a work of art. It must have been a labour of love to have made such deep dents in these solid doors. Anyone who had bothered was not making a careless expression of short-lived passion but a declaration of real, lasting devotion. ‘J - M’ - the heavy doors would never shed this expression of affection until they were taken from their hinges and turned into firewood.
As they sauntered back into the corridor, they paused outside the studio, where the framed posters jostled with each other. Felipe and Corazón appeared on one of them. The style of type dated it to around 1975 and it was advertising a flamenco performance.
‘Look, Maggie, it’s a picture of our teachers!’
‘God, so it is! Hasn’t age been cruel!’
‘They haven’t changed that much,’ said Sonia in their defence. ‘Their figures are pretty similar.’
‘But those crow’s-feet - she didn’t have them in those days, did she?’ commented Maggie. ‘Do you think they’d show us some flamenco? Teach us how to stamp our feet? Give us a bit of a clatter on the castanets?’
Maggie didn’t wait for an answer. She was already back in the studio, explaining and gesticulating to the teachers what she wanted them to do.
Sonia watched her from the doorframe.
Finally, Felipe found some English words: ‘Flamenco can’t be taught,’ he said gutturally. ‘It’s in the blood, and only in gypsy blood at that. But you can try if you like. I’ll show you some at the end of the lesson.’
It was a statement designed to challenge.
For the next hour they repeated the movements from the first half of the lesson and then fifteen minutes before the end, Felipe clapped his hands together.
‘Now,’ he said. ‘Flamenco.’
He strutted over to the CD player, flicked swiftly through his wallet of music, and carefully extracted what he wanted. Meanwhile, Corazón changed her shoes in the corner, to a pair with heavy heels and steel-capped soles.
The class stood back, quietly expectant.They heard palms against palms and low drums. It was dark and very different from the happy-go-lucky sound of salsa.
Corazón strode out in front of the group. It was as though she no longer knew they were there. As a guitar played, she raised one arm and then another, her sinuous fingers fanning out like daisy petals. For more than five minutes, she stamped her feet in a complex sequence of heel and toe, heel and toe, that accelerated to a thunderous vibration before it stopped dead, with a final, decisive ‘BANG’ of her hard shoe on the solid floor. It was a virtuoso display of strength and breathtaking technical prowess as much as a dance, somehow the more impressive because of her age.
On the very beat that she stopped, a wail emanated from the speakers and eerily wrapped itself around everyone in the room. It was a raw-throated male voice and seemed to express the same anguish that had shown on Corazón’s face as she had danced.
Just before she finished, Felipe had begun and for a few seconds mirrored his wife’s movements, proving to the audience that this dance was not pure improvisation, but a well-rehearsed piece of choreography. Now Felipe took her place centre stage. Narrow-hipped, his slim back arched into a ‘C’, Felipe briefly struck a pose before spinning himself around and beginning a series of floor-hammering steps. Th
e sound of metal on wood bounced off the mirrored walls. His movements were even more sensual than those of his wife, and certainly more coquettish. It was as though he flirted with the class, his hands travelling up and down his body, his hips rocking one way and then another. Sonia was transfixed.
As though to compete with Corazón, he executed an ever more complex sequence of steps, time after time landing by some miracle on precisely the same spot, the music drowned out by the hammering of feet. The passion of it was extraordinary and it seemed to have come from nowhere.
Felipe’s finishing pose, eyes to the ceiling, one arm wrapped around his back, the other thrown across his front was one of pure arrogance. From the back a quiet voice said ‘Olé’. It was Corazón; even she was moved by her husband’s display, his total absorption in the moment. Then there was silence.
The Return Page 4