Only in Spain

by Nellie Bennett

  “Vámonos,” she said. Let’s go.

  I think I first fell in love with Spain on that walk to the dance school through the narrow, winding alleyways of the old town. It was the middle of March, and spring was in the air, and flamenco music seemed to come from everywhere. It spilled down from open windows. A car drove past with flamenco blaring on the radio. A man chatting to a friend on the corner sang a few lines of a song, then went back to talking. Notes from a guitar floated toward us on the breeze. The five-minute walk from Inés’s place to the dance school was like a flamenco odyssey.

  I’d expected the academy to be a big stone building full of dancers waving fans about and swarthy guitarists skulking in every corner. But it wasn’t imposing at all; it was just one of a row of white-painted, low-rise apartment blocks. Somehow that seemed even more exotic to me. I was intrigued by the thought that behind this unassuming facade there was a world of flamenco madness.

  Inés pressed a buzzer next to a picture of a fan, and the gate clicked open. Off a little tiled courtyard were two dance studios. I followed Inés to the first door.

  “This is the class you will start on Monday,” she said as she waved to the tired-looking teacher who was trying to walk her students through some simple steps.

  To my surprise, the students looked like tourists, not flamenco dancers. Some were wearing new red-and-black flamenco skirts, while others just wore tracksuit pants. Many of them seemed to be having a hard time coordinating their arms and feet. One gave up altogether and put her hands on her hips and counted softly to herself as she stepped forward and back. Looking around the room again, I saw that not one of the students was even wearing flamenco shoes.

  “Maribél is an incredible dancer,” Inés whispered. I could tell by the way the teacher moved that she was a good dancer, but there was nothing she could do with the class in front of her. It looked like none of them had had a flamenco lesson in their life. I could only imagine how Diana would have reacted if one of these girls had tried to walk into my flamenco class back home.

  Inés told me to stay and watch for as long as I liked. I nodded and said nothing. What could I have said? As I watched the class from the doorway, all I could think was, This is it? This is what I’ve come to Spain for? It was beyond depressing. I wanted to walk in there and straighten bent elbows, bend straight knees, and pull back shoulders. But even the teacher seemed to have given up on that.

  What about my dream of dancing flamenco in Spain? I’d envisaged something fast-paced and exciting. I wanted it to be too hard. I wanted to collapse at the end of the day, giddy with the new rhythms. I wanted to struggle and learn and get better. That’s what I was here for. Yes, I’d been nervous; I’d been scared. But I wanted to be nervous; I wanted to be scared. Dancing flamenco in Spain should be scary! This class of tourists was just not what I signed up for.

  As I lingered in the courtyard, I heard the sound of stomping feet and a man shouting. It was coming from the second studio. The door was closed, but from the sound of the feet, I could tell it was an advanced class.

  I went over and listened at the door just as a man started to sing over the stamping feet. Now I had to see what was going on in there. I pushed lightly at the door, and it opened a fraction. I peeked through the crack in the doorway and looked in. The dancers spun around, colored skirts flying. In the corner I could see the guitarist; sitting next to him was an old flamenco singer who sang a heartrending song. The students leaned backward and curled their arms up above their heads.

  As the music shifted to a faster tempo, I pushed the door open a fraction more. The dancers swayed their hips to the sound of the guitar, then the singer jumped up out of his seat and belted out the verse. The dancers jumped heavily onto the floorboards and threw themselves into fast footwork.

  “No!” a man shouted.

  The teacher strode into my sight line. I edged forward again and watched him demonstrate the steps, his black flamenco boots pounding the floor at lightning speed. I’d never seen anyone move that fast. He finished off the steps by spinning around one, two, three times and landing on two feet.

  Whoa.

  He clapped his hands and the students took the section again.

  “No!” He stopped them and again tilted his body and spun around impossibly quickly, landing perfectly on both feet. The girls tried again; some finished on time, but others were still late.

  I was getting dizzy just watching them. I hated turns. I would have been so much happier if they didn’t exist in flamenco. I didn’t like getting dizzy and I didn’t like falling over, and spinning around on one foot practically guaranteed both.

  The teacher grabbed a stick from the side of the room and shouted, “Otra vez!” Again! He beat the stick into the floor and counted, “Uno, dos, tres!”

  The girls shifted slightly onto the balls of their feet, getting ready to pounce. The singer began the verse again, and the girls threw themselves into an explosion of footwork.

  “Fuera!” Out! the teacher yelled.

  If they were out of time, it was only by a fraction of a second, but that was enough to get a passionate lecture from the teacher. The guitarist started the music over and the teacher jumped forward and danced, slamming the floor with his heels. He moved so fast that his feet were a blur.

  “Otra vez,” he said. The guitarist resumed playing, and the girls wiped the sweat from their brows and prepared to take the section from the beginning. I pushed the door open a little farther and watched how the students moved into position with their arms raised perfectly above their heads, then slowly brought their arms down, twirling their wrists.

  I heard the tread of the teacher’s shoes on the floor, and then he pushed the door shut. I snapped my head back as the door slammed in my face.

  And that about summed it up. I wouldn’t last five minutes in there, I told myself. I must be mad for even thinking about it. There’s no way I can do that class! But even as I tried to tell myself that, I knew it was no good. I had to find a way into that studio. The door that had just been slammed in my face was like a portal to a fabulous flamenco universe, and after one glimpse of it, there was no way I could go into the tourist class.

  I found Inés sitting at her desk in a little office space on the second floor. “Did you see the class?” she asked.

  “I did,” I said. “But it looked very…basic.”

  Inés frowned. “Maribél is teaching the beginners’ level. You made a reservation for beginners, no?” She riffled through the papers on her desk in search of my booking.

  I explained that I had made that booking thinking the level in Spain would be higher than what I was used to in Sydney. “But there is another class,” I said.

  “Enrique’s class?” Inés’s frown deepened. “Enrique’s class is advanced level.”

  I didn’t want to beg, but I would do what I had to do. “Please, Inés, let me try. I’ve come so far just to dance flamenco. Please don’t put me in the easy class. Let me try it. Just one class. Just let me do Monday, and if he says I’m not good enough, I’ll go back down to the other class. Please.”

  Inés’s frown softened. She took a pen and crossed “beginners” off my form and wrote “advanced” over the top. “I’ll have to get Enrique’s permission. And if you can’t keep up with the group, you cannot stay in the class. But you can try on Monday.”

  “Thank you!” I said. I wanted to hug her, but the wide, paper-strewn desk was between us. So instead I skipped happily down the stairs and out of the school. It wasn’t until I was halfway down the street that I realized what I’d done. In my effort to convince Inés that I could handle the advanced flamenco class, I’d forgotten that I couldn’t. They were doing triple turns in there, and I couldn’t even do one turn without falling over.

  Maybe in Spain it would be different, I told myself. This was the other side of the world, after all. Maybe gravity wou
ld be more on my side here. Turning into the narrow side street that led back to Inés’s apartment, I looked both ways to make sure no one was coming, then leaned onto the ball of my right foot and spun around. I stumbled at the end, but that was because there was some gravel under my shoe. I tried again, going for a double turn this time. At the end of it I almost fell over. Third time’s a charm. I took a deep breath and turned again.

  “Olé!”

  I looked up and saw a man leaning down from an open window. I quickly straightened up and hurried away down the street. Once I’d turned the corner, I started to laugh. Okay, it was embarrassing, but I’d just had my first ever olé.

  THE DANCER

  Or

  Would you like pig’s ear with that?

  Perhaps this trip had been a big mistake. I clearly wasn’t the intrepid traveler I had imagined myself to be. Maybe the most crushing part of what we call “growing up” is seeing the gap between the people we think we are and the people we actually are. In my case it wasn’t just a gap, it was a yawning chasm.

  When I’d pictured myself in Seville, I’d imagined drinking red wine and dancing flamenco in little bars until dawn. But now, as I walked along the narrow streets of the center of Seville and passed those little bars, I was too scared to even go in.

  Even though there was a cold wind that made me pull my jacket tightly around myself, the bars were so full that people were spilling out onto the street. Beautiful, dark-eyed Spanish people, all laughing and shouting and every now and again breaking into a flamenco song. Just do it, I told myself as I came to another bar. Just walk in and order a glass of wine. But I was too shy, so I walked on.

  I’d been in Seville for a whole weekend by now and hadn’t even managed to get myself a meal. When I’d tried to go out for dinner on Saturday night, I’d been told at each restaurant that the kitchen was closed until nine. Until nine? I wanted to protest; at nine I’d be passed out with jet lag! But I didn’t have the Spanish to say more than “gracias,” so I went back to the apartment, hungry and dejected.

  Of course, I’d woken up starving on Sunday morning. And the cold water that dribbled from the showerhead didn’t make me feel any better. Inés had warned me that Seville had a very temperamental water supply and that it was often cut off altogether. “Then we drink wine,” she’d said with a grin.

  After a quick shower, I wrapped myself in a thin towel and imagined the breakfast I would have at the first café I came across. It would be just like the ones I’d seen in my guidebook: hot coffee, thick slabs of toast slathered in rich green olive oil…a vegan’s dream.

  But it seemed that nothing in Seville was going to be that easy. First of all, it took me an hour to find a café that was open. I was up early, but even so—is nine thirty in the morning really too early for coffee? In Sydney you can always get a coffee at seven a.m. And a vegan bruffin, in the right part of town.

  I finally found an open café, but as I walked in I was engulfed in a cloud of cigarette smoke. There were no tables, just bar stools on which perched a group of old men drinking red wine. But there were also two women having coffee, so I ordered myself a café solo, which is just as sad as it sounds—a lonesome coffee with no milk. I didn’t know how to ask for soy milk in Spanish, and from the autographed pictures of bullfighters that covered the walls and the mounted bull’s head above the register, I gathered that this place wasn’t particularly vegan-friendly.

  I tried to ask for some food, but with my nonexistent Spanish, that wasn’t so easy. The waiter just stared at me as I mimed putting food into my mouth and rubbing my tummy. One of the ladies next to me pointed at a doughnut that she was eating with a knife and fork; I smiled at her politely and asked if there was anything else to choose from.

  Eventually, the waiter scooped some chips out of a bag and put them on a plate for me. They looked like Japanese rice chips but had a strange taste that I couldn’t quite place, almost like deep-fried sweat. What was I eating?

  “Corteza,” the waiter told me.

  “Qué?” I asked.

  One of the doughnut ladies smiled kindly and said in heavily accented English, “Corteza is skin from a pig.”

  Skin…from a pig. I was eating skin from a pig.

  There was an odd smell in the air, and as I looked around, I noticed a tray of skinned rabbits by the coffee machine. Was that where the stink was coming from? As my eyes strayed farther, I saw a bucket full of live snails, looking like one writhing mass.

  The waiter opened up a container and pulled out a heap of yellow things I couldn’t identify. He chopped them up with a huge knife and arranged them on a platter, which he put on the counter for me.

  “What is that?” I asked the lady next to me.

  “This is very good,” she said. “It is ear of a pig.”

  It was all too much. The smoke, the taste of pig sweat, the coffee I tried to wash it down with, which was somehow both burnt and watery at the same time. The skinned rabbits, the clicking of the shells as the snails slithered over each other, the glassy stares of the mounted bulls’ heads on the wall, the women delicately cutting up their doughnuts with knives and forks. It was like I’d stumbled into some kind of surrealist horror film.

  Walking through the city streets that evening, I shuddered at the memory and pulled my jacket tighter around myself as a cold wind whistled up the narrow alleyway. I wished that I was tucked up in bed, as unflamenco as that might sound. But instead I was on my way to see my first ever flamenco show, in a tablao in the old part of Seville.

  Tablao is the Spanish name for a flamenco theater. These generally have a little stage for one or sometimes two dancers and a couple of musicians. Tablaos are often found in bars or restaurants, but the one I was going to was called Casa de la Memoria, and it was in an old Moorish palace.

  Inés had insisted I go that night to see the dancer who was performing, Carmen Mesa. She’d told me it would be an experience I’d never forget, and though I was groggy with jet lag and still starving, I couldn’t pass up a recommendation like that.

  I took my seat in the interior patio of the palace, where the tablao was set up. The floor was paved with delicately painted tiles in shades of blue and green, and the walls were hung with vines and ferns. When the lights went down, I looked up and saw the stars twinkling in the sky overhead.

  A flamenco guitar began to play in the darkness, and I felt that same thrill I’d experienced the first time I heard the flamenco guitar in the dance studio in Sydney. The notes seemed to form a net that tightened around me and pulled me into the moment.

  Then a light appeared in the darkness. Holding a lantern, the dancer walked slowly out across the tiled floor toward the stage. She placed the lamp at the foot of the stage, illuminating the singer and the guitarist who sat behind her. The dancer lifted one foot ever so slowly, and with her chest puffed out like a bullfighter, she stepped onto the stage.

  She raised her arms up above her head, then with a clap of her hands, jumped onto the balls of her feet and began to dance. She turned, one, two, three, four, five times. I watched her spin, wondering how it was possible that she could move so fast without toppling off the tiny stage. She let out a hoarse cry and landed on both feet, arms still raised above her head. The singer lifted up her head and shouted, “Olé!”

  I sat in the audience with my body craned forward, my mouth hanging open and my eyes like saucers. The dancer was so sharp, so precise, so present, yet it was as if she was in another world. She’d been taken over by the energy that electrifies an artist and makes her capable of creating something that has never existed before and will never exist again. Yes, she was dancing on a stage, but she wasn’t dancing for the crowd. She was dancing for herself.

  And you know how in life you have those moments, those little revelations or epiphanies or whatever you want to call them, when life just suddenly makes sense? Right then, as I gazed a
t the dancer, all I wanted was to be like her. I wanted to experience what she was experiencing. I wanted to feel what she felt. Everything just clicked into place inside my head and I realized that this was what I’d been searching for. This was what I’d traveled to Spain to find. And yet it was something that was so far from the world I’d come from, and so different from what my future was supposed to contain.

  After years of feeling lost, I suddenly knew what it was that I wanted out of life. At the time, it was too soon for me to put it into words, I was just overtaken by excitement. And it wasn’t even about flamenco anymore. I just knew that I wanted to live the way that dancer danced on the stage. I wanted to attack my life with that passion, to live with her joy and her devotion to her art. I wanted to take risks like the quintuple turn, knowing that I could all too easily spin out of control. I wanted to feel my feet on the very edge of the stage and sway like I was about to topple over, then wink at the audience and let them laugh in relief. I wanted to live without being afraid of life, of passion, or of falling off the stage.

  And I realized I had been right to hold on to the idea that there was a life out there for me waiting to be lived. I’d been right saying no to a plan B, because if I’d pursued a plan B, I would have missed this moment, right here among the small crowd of a tiny tablao.

  All those years I’d been searching for something I craved, who would have thought that I would find it in a leafy patio, behind an old wooden door, down a narrow alleyway in the backstreets of Seville?

  THE BIEN

  Or

  Toma que toma!

  I relived the show in my dreams that night. Tossing and turning, I saw again the way the dancer’s feet had attacked that tiny stage. I wanted to be her. Yet when I’d looked closely at her beige-colored shoes, I’d noticed that they were wrecked from dancing. How was it that such an extraordinary artist had to dance in ruined shoes? It was a strange concept for me: I came from a world where people could afford to buy an extra pair of shoes whenever they felt like a bit of a lift. We even have a term for it. It’s called retail therapy, and we’re told it’s healthy.