Only in Spain

by Nellie Bennett

  “No, it’s on the twelve.”

  “I thought it was a contra.”

  “No, that’s the tacón.”

  Gólpe, contra, tacón? What wonderful words. All the more wonderful because I had absolutely no idea what they meant.

  When Diana came back in, they scurried off to get changed. Diana took her position at the front of the room and lifted the hem of her long skirt, revealing beautiful black suede shoes. She picked up one foot and slammed it into the floor, making the mirror tremble.

  Whoa.

  The next twenty minutes were spent learning variations on stamping: double stamps, triple stamps, jumping stamps, ball-heel stamps. By the end of it my thighs were burning, my hips were aching, and my feet were killing me. If I hadn’t had that glimpse of the advanced class, I wouldn’t have believed that this stamping could bear any resemblance to dance. It felt more like military training. And though Diana assured us that we were building up strength and technique, it was hard to see how what we were doing would one day become a dance.

  When Diana gave us a five-minute break, I went to the back of the studio and leaned my elbows on the windowsill, letting the evening breeze cool me down. I could literally feel calluses forming on my feet. If I keep this up, I thought, I’ll never be able to wear sandals again. Sascha would not approve.

  As I looked out the window, there was something about the soft evening light on the terra-cotta rooftops that made me feel that I could be in Spain. And just as I thought that, a guitar started to play behind me. It was a run of notes that seemed to chase each other up my spine. I froze and listened for the first time in my life to a flamenco guitar.

  I turned around and saw a guitarist sitting in the corner tuning up. He adjusted the bar on his fretboard and played again. I leaned there against the windowsill, completely captivated by the music. I didn’t know then that the song he was playing was called a soleá; all I knew was that I wanted to make this music the soundtrack to my life.

  Diana called us back from our break. She stood facing us and lifted her arms above her head in two perfectly curved lines. We followed her movements and circled our arms around our heads, first right, then left, then both arms together.

  I saw my reflection in the mirror as I circled my arms above my head. Okay, so my skirt would never make it into the style pages of Vogue. My shoes weren’t those made-in-Spain suede creations the advanced girls wore, and with my red hair and pale skin there was no way I would ever pass for a gypsy chick. But as the long-haired guitarist in the corner played his Spanish guitar, I couldn’t help but feel fabulously exotic.

  My shoulders burned and my fingers trembled as Diana coaxed us to stretch our arms out and back and up and around. If she hadn’t been so intimidating, I would have dropped my arms and rubbed my poor aching muscles. But when Diana demonstrated the movements, I was stunned by the beauty of her silhouette. She twirled her wrists and circled her arms like a witch conjuring spirits.

  I was so taken by the elegance of her movements that I forgot what I was doing and mixed up my arms. But I didn’t care how bad I looked. I knew I’d practice every day if I could one day be half as good as her. I couldn’t imagine anything more beautiful than to twist and twirl and stamp my feet to the sound of a flamenco guitar. And when your heart wants that, what can you say, but… Well, why don’t you?

  THE SHOES

  Or

  Trent Nathan, Trent Nathan, Trent Nathan…

  From then on, I was hooked. I lived for my weekly classes and practiced every chance I got. If anyone had ever watched the Level Two security tapes, they would have seen a girl attempting to hide behind rails of clothes while doing very strange things. I was always slightly nervous that the floor manager would call me into her office and ask me to explain why I had been seen twirling around the mannequins or stamping on the carpet, but I was too addicted to stop.

  As the term continued, we began to learn more and more complicated steps, tricky combinations of tapping toes and knocking heels that I practiced while standing behind the desk writing up the sales book. Then there was “running step,” which I’d do as I hurried down the staff corridor after work. The jumps and the stamping were more difficult to practice discreetly. For those I needed a place where no one would hear the sound of my feet clattering on the floor, so I started practicing in the elevator. The elevator had two advantages: the trip was always short, so it forced me to work on speed, and the sprung floor meant that I didn’t hurt my knees.

  Then Diana taught us a new move called the hammer step. It involved jumping up and landing with a heavy thud on one foot and stamping three times. It was repeated over and over again, right then left then right then left, so that when you got your speed up it sounded like a jackhammer—hence the name. This is an important step in flamenco and is used a lot. It’s all about power and precision, and you need to build up strength in your legs to make sure that each of those stamps sounds even and is dead on the beat, especially when you’re going fast. But it was a difficult one to practice without attracting attention.

  One day when Sascha sent me down in the staff elevator to pick up some docket rolls from Level One, I decided to try doing ten hammer steps in a row before the doors opened. I was up to seven when suddenly the elevator stopped.

  I couldn’t believe it. I was stuck between floors. All my jumping around must have triggered a braking mechanism. I started to panic. There’s nothing like an elevator breakdown to remind you of the fact that you are suspended in midair and that the only thing protecting you from the undiscriminating force of gravity is an old cable and some rusty brakes. The elevator jerked into motion, then stopped. “Oh God.” I whispered, my heart thumping. The elevator started to descend again, and I clutched at the walls and held my breath.

  The doors opened on Level One, and I stumbled out into a crowd of black-suited women. “What was all that noise?” they clucked. “It sounded like someone was hammering in there!” I slunk away to find docket rolls and decided to find somewhere else to practice.

  • • •

  After the first term, I moved up to intermediate level. Intermediate was a different world. A lot of the students were doing it for the third or fourth time, because Diana didn’t let just anyone into her advanced class, so they knew a lot about flamenco. Some of them even made yearly trips to Spain, to places with wonderful names like Jerez and Granada and Andalusia.

  Most of the girls in my new class were Spanish, or came from Spanish families, or had some kind of story that involved Spanish ancestry, like that they were descended from Spanish shepherds who came out as free settlers. I went through my family tree on both sides, but there was nothing even slightly Mediterranean in our bloodline. We’d managed to maintain a surprisingly pure Celtic lineage, much to my disappointment.

  There were two guys in the class: one was Greek and the other was Lebanese, and in their fitted black pants they managed to look like extras in a Ricky Martin video. But I couldn’t be mistaken for a Spanish chick during a blackout on a moonless night. My skin is so pale it practically glows in the dark, and the Aussie sun is really good at bringing out my freckles. If I could just get all those little dots to join together I’d have a very flamenco tan, but I didn’t really think that would work. And investing in a fake tan would only make my skin the same color as my hair. The redheaded trait is a stealth gene and it chooses its prey with care. I was the only one in my family to get it. The rest of them are spunky brunettes who’d blend into the crowd in any European café. I’d be the one embraced by the group of drunk tourists who wanted me to join them in a verse of “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling.”

  The intermediate students talked about Spain and flamenco, and I learned a lot from those weekly conversations. I learned that flamenco comes from the Spanish gypsies, los gitanos. Nobody knows where the Spanish gypsies originated from, but it is believed that they came from India, and traveled through
the Middle East, across the north of Africa and into Spain, bringing flamenco with them.

  I also discovered that flamenco isn’t just one kind of dance: within it there are hundreds, if not thousands, of different styles, each with its own compás, or rhythm, and with its own music, history, and tradition. I was beginning to see that to learn it all would take me lifetimes. We started out with one of the simpler styles, soleá por bulerías. (By the way, how cool is that name? Soleá por bulerías. It made me wish that someone would ask what I was doing on Tuesday, so I could say, “Oh, I have flamenco. We’re doing a soleá por bulerías. It’s very demanding.”) My classmates talked about flamenco singers, dancers, and guitarists, and I learned to look suitably impressed when names like Vicente Amigo and Rafael Amargo came up in conversation, but I didn’t really know who they were.

  I wanted to learn more, so I staked out the world music section of my closest CD store and pounced on anything new that came in from Spain. I bought a couple of albums by the guitarist Paco de Lucía, which I played on a loop, and some flamenco pop from the group Ketama, but I was hungry for more music.

  Tuesday soon became my favorite day of the week. On Monday night I’d pack my long skirt and dance shoes in my bag ready for class, and all the next day I’d eagerly watch the clock. One particularly slow Tuesday, Sascha and I shut down the register at twenty to six. There was no one around, so we locked up the back room and stashed our coats under the register so we could make a dash for the lifts as soon as the bell rang.

  Then we got a customer. I heard the Jaws theme playing in my head as she walked across the floor in our direction. “Trent Nathan, Trent Nathan, Trent Nathan…” Sascha said softly, willing her to a different section. But it was no good. She was heading straight for us.

  Shopgirl Rule #1: Smile!

  Rule #2: Ask an open-ended question. Shopgirls are forbidden from asking any questions that can be answered with a simple yes or no. We must instead trap the customer into expressing their needs. So with a smile that felt heavy on my lips I asked, “What can we help you with this evening?”

  The customer wanted to look at suits, and although we told her we really didn’t have time to show her the full range, she insisted. She asked for gray suits, black suits, brown suits, pinstriped suits. She tried them all on, then dumped them, one after the other, in a heap on the fitting room floor. It didn’t matter how many times that happened, I could never get over the lack of respect some people have for exquisitely tailored clothing.

  When the six p.m. bell rang, we had a mountain of clothes to put back on hangers and tidy away. We didn’t get out of there until twenty past six, and even though I ran all the way to the station, and then from the station to the dance studio, by the time I arrived I was late, and Diana didn’t like it when we were late. I always tried to be the perfect student, but today there was nothing for it. I hurried in, whispering apologies, and joined in the last part of the footwork drill.

  I pounded my feet into the floor, letting out the anger I felt toward that customer. She had made me late for class just because she wanted to play dress-up. I stamped my feet harder. Diana was still clapping her hands and stamping her feet, shouting at us to go faster and harder. Of course it would never have occurred to the customer that I actually had a life and that my entire reason for being was not just to convince her she wasn’t fat while finding her a bigger size. Stupid, stupid, stupid! I thought as I stamped my feet.

  I thought of the time-wasters, the rude women who demanded to be treated like princesses when we were rushed off our feet and in desperate need of a drink of water. The people who tried to rip the security tags out of cashmere sweaters or who came in with raging BO and tried on a dozen different items, then left them strewn on the floor of the fitting room for us to pick up and send off to be dry-cleaned.

  And as I drove my feet into the floor, I realized that I wasn’t really angry at the customers. They had a right to come into the store, even at ten minutes before closing time. But what was I doing there? What had I been doing there for the last two years?

  Diana stamped her feet and clapped faster. I held my own gaze in the mirror and realized that I was angry with myself. I was angry with the life I was living. I was angry that things hadn’t turned out the way I’d imagined. Actually, anger wasn’t the right word for it: I was furious.

  Diana switched to hammer step, and I let myself drop into the floor with all my weight and stamp my feet. And though my thighs were burning and my feet were numb, I kept up the rhythm. Other students faltered and stopped, one by one, but I kept on, and soon there were only two of us left. All eyes were on us to see who would collapse first. Determined that it wasn’t going to be me, I pummeled the floor with a force I didn’t know I had; then, as I brought my foot down one more time, my shoe went crack! I stumbled forward and almost fell on the girl in front of me.

  I lifted up my foot. The heel of my shoe had snapped. I couldn’t believe it. I’d danced so hard I’d actually broken my shoe. I didn’t even know that was possible.

  At the end of the footwork routine, Diana beckoned me out to reception with her. One of her advanced girls, she explained, had just bought a pair of flamenco shoes from Spain, but when they arrived she found she’d ordered the wrong size. Diana took a shoe box out from under the desk. She lifted the lid; sitting inside the box was a pair of brown suede flamenco shoes, just like the ones I’d seen the advanced girls wearing. Diana took one out and handed it to me. It was heavier than I expected. The sole was made from a strip of wood that was hammered with dozens of tiny nails for extra strength and sound.

  “They’ll last you years,” Diana said as I buckled them up.

  I skipped back to the sprung floor of the studio to try them out. They sounded wonderful. The stamp was so much heavier and stronger than my old shoes had produced, and they were much more comfortable. “I could dance in them for days!” I said to Diana.

  She raised an impeccably penciled eyebrow and said, “Why don’t you?”

  THE SHOE MAN

  Or

  Sit down and tell me who you are

  Once I had my first pair of real flamenco shoes, I found it almost impossible to take them off. I was like a little girl who is so in love with her new party shoes that she insists on wearing them to bed.

  At every opportunity I slipped them on and practiced clicking my heels and tapping my toes, and before long I had worn two holes in their precious soles. I showed them to Diana and she told me to go and see the Shoe Man. “He’s the only person in Sydney who understands flamenco shoes,” she said, handing me his card.

  I remember the day I made my first visit to the Shoe Man, because it was the same day the new collection of Jimmy Choos arrived on Level Five. The news traveled like a wave across the floor, and by nine thirty-five everyone knew. At each counter the girls were taking turns to go up and get a look at the new shoes.

  As soon as I arrived at work, Sascha handed me the feather duster. “Just look busy, darling. Back in a tick.” And before I could open my mouth to ask what was going on, she’d disappeared up the escalator.

  When Sascha returned it was to grab the calculator and figure out how many hours’ overtime she would need to work to take home a pair of black stiletto heels with an ankle strap and an oversize buckle. The result was: yes, she could have the shoes, but no life for the next six months. She sent me up to take a look at them and to tell her whether I thought they were worth maxing out her only remaining credit card. So I unclipped my name tag and took the escalators up to Level Five.

  I walked past the school shoes, the Clarks, the orthopedic shoes, the work shoes, and traveled around the floor to where the toes were shinier and pointier and the heels higher and higher, until I reached the wall where the Jimmy Choos were displayed, like butterflies from a far-off rain forest.

  And they were beautiful. Oh yes, they were perfection on five-inch heels. Sasch
a was right. Every single pair was worth giving up your Sundays for. I reached out and picked one up. It was shiny and impossibly high.

  I gazed at this off-the-runway confection that any woman would give her firstborn for, and as I ran my fingers over the pencil-thin heel, I couldn’t help thinking, “What good are these to me? I could break them with one stamp of my foot.” I put the shoe back on its pedestal and squeezed out of the crowd. I didn’t need Jimmy Choo. I had a date with the Shoe Man.

  • • •

  I had imagined the Shoe Man’s shop would be like Santa’s workshop, with boxes of flamenco shoes piled high to the ceiling and dozens of little helpers sipping on sherry as they hammered tiny nails into thick wooden soles. So when I reached the address on the card, I thought I must have made a mistake. It was nothing more than a shop front with FIX YOUR SHOES WHILE YOU WAIT in peeling paint. Surely this couldn’t be it. I hesitantly pushed open the door and stepped inside.

  The walls were covered with posters for old stage shows, and a wooden shelf behind the counter held rows of resoled tap shoes, ballet slippers, sparkly ballroom shoes, and patent-leather lace-up jazz shoes. A young man in blue jeans and a leather jacket stood waiting, drumming his fingers on the counter. Then the door to the back room swung open and out stepped a man carrying half a dozen shoe boxes. This must be the Shoe Man.

  If the shop had disappointed me, the Shoe Man didn’t. With tanned olive skin, dark eyes, and black hair flecked with gray he looked like a flamenco artist off the cover of one of the albums I collected from the Spain section of the CD store.

  He looked up at me as the young male dancer took pair after pair of identical tap shoes out of the boxes. “You here for ballet shoes?”

  “No,” I told him. “I dance flamenco.”

  “You?” He looked me up and down. “You are dancing flamenco?” That thought seemed to blow his mind. I felt a little disappointed that even though I couldn’t plié to save my life it was easier for him to believe that I was a ballerina than a flamenco dancer.