Only in Spain

by Nellie Bennett

  The more I dwelled on this, the more remarkable the dancer seemed to me. That is the dedication of the artist: training her entire life to put on a show regardless of whether she was paid for it. I couldn’t have had a sharper contrast to the world of Level Two.

  I opened my eyes and saw the first hint of morning light out the window. As I lay there, I could still hear the rhythms of the guitar and the dancer’s feet in my head. I promised myself that I would throw myself into my classes and dance my feet to the bone. I would train night and day if that was what it took, but I would learn to dance like the dancer in the tablao.

  But the confidence and certainty I felt as I lay in bed burst like a bubble when I stepped into the changing room of the dance school later that morning. A group of girls spoke in Spanish as they sprayed on deodorant and pinned up their hair, and two Japanese girls in long black skirts stared into space as they practiced rapid footwork on the tiled floor.

  There seemed to be an invisible divide between the gorgeous Spanish girls in their shrugs, leotards, and worn-down flamenco shoes and the giggling tourists who were getting ready to go into the beginners’ class. Two American girls were talking much too loudly in English; the sound of their voices made me wince, because I knew I should be in their class. I called them tourists, but how was I any different?

  Some people thrive under pressure, but not me. My brain checks out, my stomach seizes up, and my body shakes like jelly in a thunderstorm. I’ve always been that way. And not just for big things; exams, flights, phone calls that I don’t want to make, all that kind of stuff makes me nervous. Raise the stakes a little and I’m a mess.

  As I left the changing room, I saw the teacher, Enrique, walking up the corridor toward the studio. When I’d peeked into the studio Friday, I hadn’t seen much more than glimpses of his racing feet and fluid silhouette, but as he was walking toward me, I realized he was the very embodiment of all the romantic dreams I’d ever had.

  Maybe this was why I’d come to Seville. Maybe it was written in the stars that we would meet. He was going to be my dance teacher, and after hours of sweating over complex footwork, we would fall in love. It would be a whirlwind love affair that would later be made into a Hollywood movie starring Antonio Banderas and Kirsten Dunst. And we would take our adorable flamenco-dancing kids to the premiere…

  “Eres la chica nueva?”

  He had stopped outside the studio and was talking to me. I swallowed and tried to see if my vocal cords still worked. “Uh?”

  “Vas a tomar la clase?”

  “Eh?”

  “No hablas español?”

  “No…?”

  He gave up and walked past me into the studio, and I felt myself deflate in the face of my own idiocy. I really had to learn some Spanish. I scurried to the back of the room where I hoped I would be as inconspicuous as possible.

  “Chicas, vámonos!” Girls, let’s go. He clapped his hands and all the girls started to dance.

  That’s it? I screamed silently from the back of the room. No instructions, nothing? How on earth was I supposed to know what to do? But I seemed to be the only one who had absolutely no idea of what was going on. Everyone else knew the routine by heart. This was my worst nightmare come true. Deciding I had to just do something, even if it was wrong, I tried to mimic the girls in front of me. Toe, heel, tap, shuffle, ball, heel—ahhh! what the hell?! And now to the left, toe, heel, shuffle, point, ball, heel—aha! That was it! I cracked the code!

  Enrique raised his voice above the noise of stamping feet and said, “Con faldas!” With skirts! The dancers picked up the corners of their skirts and held them out, swishing them to the right and to the left as they moved. I stopped momentarily at this beautiful sight. All the girls moved with an ultrafeminine glamour, holding a perfect curve in their backs and twirling the ruffled skirts around to right and left. But just as I lifted my skirt and held it out, trying to imitate the movement, again they changed the routine on me.

  What a disaster. I wished I could sink into the floorboards—anything rather than standing like an idiot while these beautiful Spanish girls danced rings around me.

  The guitarist walked in and sat down to tune up. When the girls came to the end of the dance, Enrique added on a new step, a lightning-fast combination of stamping feet, tapping toes, and I didn’t even know what else.

  The class started to practice the new step, repeating it over and over, and Enrique walked between the rows, listening carefully. Someone was out of time, and he knew it. Of course it was me. He walked between the dancers, every now and again stopping the class and telling one girl to do it on her own. Then he would nod his head and move on.

  I started to panic. I had absolutely no idea how to do the step, and I knew that if he asked me to repeat it I would just burst into tears. I got more and more nervous as he came closer and closer to my corner, and the more nervous I got the more my feet clattered on the floor.

  Once he made his way to my back corner, he knew he’d found his culprit. He silenced the class and pointed at me. Everyone turned around to stare. I took a deep breath and did my version of the step.

  He shook his head and demonstrated the step again. I stared at his feet, but he was moving so fast that I couldn’t see what he was doing. Feeling everyone’s eyes on me, I grabbed at my skirt and did something, but I was so far off that the sound of my own feet made me wince.

  “Escucha,” he said. I looked at him blankly. He pointed to his ear. Ah…he was telling me to listen. He repeated the step again, and this time instead of watching his feet I tried to hear the rhythm.

  I took a deep breath and replayed the sound in my head, then, without giving myself time to think, let my feet copy the rhythm pattern back. Enrique nodded and said, “Bien.”

  Bien. That, if I wasn’t mistaken, meant good. He said “good”! I gave a sigh of relief. I’d passed the first test. I was so happy I missed the next step that Enrique added on to the end of the sequence, and once again I was the only girl in the room who had no idea what she was doing.

  I guessed I might as well get used to that.

  • • •

  As I got changed after class, I repeated to myself over and over again, “I did it.” I was the worst person in the class, and I knew I didn’t deserve to be there, but it was the flamenco class of my dreams, and if I had to practice for hours every day just to keep up, I would.

  Just as I was about to leave, a woman walked into the changing room. She was in her midtwenties, with jet-black hair, pale skin, and large, almond-shaped eyes. One thing I’d learned on Level Two was how to size up a customer in an instant, and I immediately noticed that her skirt was new and expensive, and the Louis Vuitton tote she was using as a dance bag was no fake. She put a foot up on the bench to unbuckle her shoe, which was the deepest, velvetiest purple. Before I realized I was staring, she had caught my eye in the mirror.

  “I love your shoes,” I said.

  She gave me a wink. “Me too,” she said. “I bought them here, in Plaza del Salvador. But you know I need to get another pair, in beige. I saw a dancer at the Casa de la Memoria with that color shoe.”

  I knew straightaway she was talking about the dancer I had seen the night before at the tablao. The image of those beige shoes all scuffed and streaked with black, tapping away on the tiny wooden stage, was fixed in my mind.

  “You saw her also?” She pressed her hand to her heart. “I just love her clothes. The suit she wore in the beginning, the shirt with the ruffles and the bolero-style jacket? We have a shop in Zurich that sells this kind of thing. And the dress, the orange one? That is my favorite color. Orange, not like Hermès orange, but brighter, you know?”

  I asked her if she was Swiss, but she shook her head and said, with a bat of her fanlike eyelashes, “No, I’m Persian.”

  Persia…I did a quick mental cross-reference and came up with: Middle Easter
n country, possibly mythological, famous for carpets.

  She saw my hesitation and helped me out. “Today it is called Iran.”

  Ah, right. That Persia.

  We left the school together, and as we walked, she told me her name was Zahra; like me, she’d come to Seville to take dance classes for a few weeks. She asked if I’d join her for a coffee, and I hesitated. After my traumatic experience with the pig skin, I had decided to avoid Spanish cafés. But Zahra had already taken me by the arm and was leading me toward her favorite place.

  We stopped at a cute little café that had a few tables out underneath the orange trees. The blossoms were just starting to open, and their fragrance wafted down to us. “I love this smell,” she said. “I want to find a perfume that smells like this. In Spain it is called azahar, you know? It is an Arabic word.”

  “Do you speak Arabic?”

  “Yes, I studied it at the university, and I use it a lot in my work.”

  “What do you do?” I asked.

  “I manage Middle Eastern investment for a bank in Zurich. And you?”

  After hearing that she managed the wealth of some of the most oil-rich nations of the world, I was embarrassed to tell her that I was a shopgirl.

  “Oh, that must be so much fun!” she said. “I worked in a shop as well after I finished in the university. I just loved it. Of course, now I work in the bank, which is a very good job for me, but it is so stressful.”

  As we lingered over our coffees, a delivery truck pulled up outside the café. Two men climbed out and started unloading beer kegs from the truck. One man stood up on the tray and hurled the kegs down to the pavement below, and the other man grabbed them as they rolled across the street. One keg broke open as it hit the ground and beer spurted out of it like a fountain, but the men barely glanced at it, just kept on with their work.

  “Can you imagine if this happened in Switzerland?” Zahra asked, looking down at the lake of beer that was forming in the street. “Zurich is like the Swiss watches, you know? Everything has to be perfect. But here the people live with…with toma que toma! I love this expression. It is what they say in the flamenco shows.”

  “What does it mean?” I asked.

  Zahra shrugged. “I don’t know. Toma…toma means ‘take,’ no?”

  “Take it, take it?” I suggested.

  “Yes! This is what the singers always say to the dancers in the flamenco shows. Take it, take it!” She started to repeat it each time the delivery guy threw down a keg of beer. “Toma…que toma…que toma…”

  She called the waiter over with a wave of her impeccably manicured hand and ordered a second coffee. Then she lowered her Armani sunglasses and gave me a wink. “This is Spain, chica. Toma que toma!”

  THE G WORD

  Or

  Turn, turn, turn

  I slipped my feet into my flamenco shoes. They had molded to my feet and felt like an extension of my body. Every time I put them on it was like coming home.

  Inés had told me I could come and use one of the studios in the evenings when all the classes were over. It was my only way of keeping up with Enrique’s class. Every day I stumbled through the new choreography, memorizing all I could. Then in the evenings, when no one was around, I slipped into the studio, buckled up my dance shoes, and went through the steps by myself. This was my favorite hour of the day. It was just me and the mirror and the fading light that filled the studio with a dusky glow. I kept the fluorescent lights off and danced in the twilight, watching the long shadows I cast on the wooden floor.

  As I went over the steps, I thought about my new teacher. Was he not the man I’d been dreaming of all my life? A flamenco-dancing Don Juan with eyes like a pirate and a soft, caressing voice… I was in danger of sounding like a frustrated Harlequin heroine, but it was true: he was the kind of man I’d always dreamed of but never really believed existed.

  Comparing him to the guys I knew back in Sydney made me laugh out loud. I didn’t have much of a social circle back home, which was understandable given that I spent 60 percent of my time in women’s fashion, at least 30 percent asleep, and another 10 percent lying in bed trying to convince myself to get up. The only way I was going to meet someone was if he bumped into me while I was trying to do my lipstick on the bus, or came up to Level Two in search of a birthday present for his mother. The guys I did know were mostly my friends’ university-going boyfriends and their friends. They generally talked about things they were studying or social issues or other things that even in my most imaginative mode I could hardly describe as romantic. But even though I had no reason to believe that my fantasies would ever be fulfilled, I’d dreamed of the perfect man. He’d be tall with dark hair and darker eyes that would meet mine across a crowded room, and I would know immediately he was the one I’d been waiting for. And he would sweep me into his arms without a thought as to whether I might interpret his actions as presumptuous or sexist. He wouldn’t ask me what kind of music I was into or what type of beer I liked, or whether I’d read any good Dostoyevsky lately, because he wouldn’t care. We’d just look into each other’s eyes and know that we had found what we were looking for…

  I was so swept up in my romantic daydream that as I leaned in for the triple turn my foot got tangled up in my skirt and I stumbled forward, almost falling over. In frustration I cried out, “Arrrrgh!”

  “Tranquila.”

  I jumped and turned around. Standing in the doorway was Enrique. How long had he been there? I was grateful that the lights were off; there was no way he could have known what I’d been thinking about, yet I felt sure that my thoughts were written across my face.

  He walked in and stood next to me in front of the mirror. Then, lifting up with impeccable balance, he spun around, once, twice, three, four times. “Ves? See? Fácile,” he said. Fácile means “easy.” I thought I should explain that, because I don’t consider a quadruple turn your standard definition of “easy.”

  “Inténtalo,” he continued. This word I didn’t know, and I wished that I could cling to my ignorance, but I could tell from his face that he was saying, “Now you try it.”

  I knew going into the turn that it wouldn’t end well, and I didn’t even get the full way around before I stumbled.

  After watching my attempt, Enrique lifted up onto the ball of his foot and gestured to me to do the same. I tried to copy his posture. He came around behind me and corrected my arms and directed my eyes straight ahead, a little above my sight line. I swayed there in the music-box-doll position, afraid to breathe in case I toppled over. Then he placed one hand on my waist and another on my shoulder and spun me around.

  I fell over almost immediately, but Enrique told me to get back up on my tiptoes and try again. When I was balanced with my arms in two perfect curves, he pulled back my shoulders, lifted my chin, and steadied me again before spinning me around. I tried to keep the position, but the force of his push only got me halfway around before I fell—right on top of him. He caught me, and as I looked up at him and realized that I was in his arms, I almost forgot my embarrassment.

  It couldn’t have been more than a few seconds that I rested against him, but it felt like an eternity. His hands were on my waist to steady me, but I had no desire to regain my balance. His dark eyes searched my face, and again I was thankful that the light was too low for him to see me blush. He ran one finger along the line of my jaw and said, “Guapa.”

  And in a flash the moment was over. I straightened up and he stepped back, and again I was up on my toes ready to be pushed into another turn.

  • • •

  “Inés, what does guapa mean?” It was the next morning and I was in the kitchen putting on oats for porridge and Inés was firing up the coffeepot.

  She laughed at this question. “Are the Spanish men calling you guapa?”

  “What does it mean?” I repeated, worried now that it was someth
ing unflattering.

  “Guapa is beautiful.”

  “Oh,” I said, stirring my oats. I hadn’t expected that. I’d just assumed that it meant “klutz” or something like that.

  As I walked to the dance school, I replayed the scene in my head, now with the English subtitle. It was suddenly so romantic. Dancing alone with him, the golden light of the sunset slanting in through the windows… The sweet smell of orange blossoms filled the air, and the sun warmed my skin and made the cobblestones gleam. The sound of a flamenco guitar wafted down from an apartment, making me think it would be a good day to fall in love.

  THE SEDUCTION

  Or

  Meat is vegetarian

  Inés had been right when she said I was going to starve. After three weeks I was still searching for vegan food. All the restaurants in Seville seemed to serve the same thing: tapas. Meat tapas, fish tapas, pork tapas, and deep-fried tapas. There were no salad bars, no kebab shops, no Hari Krishnas doling out free dal. I combed the streets for a sushi train but just kept passing the same old Spanish restaurants with pigs’ legs in the windows and bulls’ heads on the walls. What’s with these people? I asked myself as I wandered through the streets looking for a non-Spanish restaurant. I’d never known a people who were so in love with their own cuisine that they had absolutely no other restaurants. Tapas, tapas, tapas…didn’t they ever just want a pappadam?

  The local supermarket had only white rice, white flour, and white sugar, which I was sure would be the death of me. All the books I’d read on healthy eating had succeeded in making me absolutely terrified of pretty much everything. I knew that white flour leaches nutrients from your bones, cooked spinach robs you of calcium, milk is toxic, sugar is a drug, caffeine gives you wrinkles, potatoes cause tumors… Really, I felt I was never safe. One of my friends back in Sydney was a medical student and absolutely militant about the dangers of sunlight. “Do you know how long you can stay in the sun before it causes permanent damage to your skin?” she used to ask me whenever she saw me out without a hat. “One second. That’s how long it takes to ruin your skin.”